Band:	Heáfodbán
Album:	Heáfodbán
Style:	Raw black metal
Release date:	March 2023

01. Dead In Place
02. Urine Sun
03. Scalp Altar
04. Incinerated Shape
05. Eviscerate Upon The Pleading
06. Hollow Fingers

Listening to new metal releases every week is bound to give you some degree of metal saturation. It's up to a noisy avant-garde psych folk atmospheric war metal album to change that.

I know that's quite a word salad I've came up with, but trust me, He​á​fodb​á​n is insane. It's the kind of album that legitimately put a smile on my face as I was listening to it. Sure, there's some really amazingly written metal this year that did the same thing, from Sermon to Ne Obliviscaris to E-an-na to Fange, but I've had a liking for the ones that really pulled the carpet from under my feet. For the TDKs, or The Canyon Observers. And it's especially interesting to see it from an anonymous band that came sort of out of nowhere. Coming into contact with them because they were on the same label Bandcamp page as a Yiddish black metal I saw recommended (and the same label has a goddamn dungeon house release) was enough to settle the fact that this was not gonna be your usual raw black metal.

I've said it before: it's not really the songwriting that has the biggest immediate effect on me. It's the sound. Your songwriting can be as good as it gets if the sound sucks, it sucks. The riffs can be good, but it's the oomph behind the riffs that really gets me going. It's why raw black metal can be such a win if even by sound alone. So taking just the sound, Heáfodbán won me over. If Revenge were dense and chaotic, Heáfodbán take that to cartoonish levels of intensity. I can't put into words the giddiness I put upon first being met with the cacophonous noise assault as the folky mood-setter "Dead In Place" switched to "Urine Sun".

Describing the sound of He​á​fodb​á​n isn't an easy task. The band already created the blueprint for the raw black metal meets psych folk on their first two releases, but it's this self-titled full length that I think really channeled the lo-fi rawness into something that really benefits the sound. Part of it is definitely the fact that the lineup seems to have changed, with drummer/vocalist Cwylming being the only one credited in the current trio and in the sextet from the rehearsal demo. There's a bit of a primal Neoandertals feeling applied to natural folky black metal in the vein of Fauna, like the IQ-dropping riffage of Astral Tomb applied to war metal, like the pagan rawness of bands of the Black Twilight Circle (especially because of the flutes) and Pan-Amerikan Native Front. The drums sound insane. The vocals are insane. The guitars are insane.

There's something thoroughly ritualistic about how unhinged Heáfodbán sound. Like a berserker trance. Like chaos unleashed on command. And it's more controlled than meets the eye, because I'm sure it's not accidental that this chaos sounds so impactful. It's not easy to make something this noisy and chaotic not feel like a headache, and pushing folk and psychedelic elements into it should make it feel overwhelming, but like a shaman's recipe, the first five tracks of He​á​fodb​á​n flow like a vitriolic ritual. The folk elements, while also appearing as separate elements in interludes, are better integrated within the sound itself, leaving plenty of moments that are more melodic and atmospheric. And then comes the last track, "Hollow Fingers", where the metal is completely swapped out for something that reminds me more of Natural Snow Buildings or Agalloch's more dronish works. Heáfodbán have ended their releases with non-metal tracks before, but with how over the top the rest of their songs were, it's amazing to see that the more long-form atmospheric closer can match that level of impact through how elegantly layered it is.

With a lot of this pagan American raw black metal front being for some reason overrun by Nazis, obviously my main concern was whether I'd accidentally land on another one of their bunch. Heáfodbán had the foresight to put a very concise "NAZI DIE" in the description of one of their other releases. Good enough for me.