Band:	In The Woods...
Album:	Otra
Style:	Avantgarde metal, Progressive black metal
Release date:	April 11, 2025
A review by:	musclassia

01. The Things You Shouldn't Know
02. A Misrepresentation Of I
03. The Crimson Crown
04. The Kiss And The Lie
05. Let Me Sing
06. Come Ye Sinners
07. The Wandering Deity

Otra, the seventh album from In The Woods..., is remarkably the first record released by the band with an unchanged line-up from the preceding release. From listening to Otra, I get the impression that the band’s songwriting is benefiting from a sense of stability.

Aside from their connection with Green Carnation, this Norwegian group is best known for their remarkable contributions to the avant-garde metal oeuvre in the 1990s, but we have now reached the point where their reunion has not only lasted for longer than their initial run as a band, but has produced more albums. Those released following their 2014 reunion have typically been good, but have generally fallen short of greatness. While Otra – a concept album themed around the namesake river running through the band’s hometown of Kristiansand – isn’t quite the album to rival their 90s classics, it does maintain the slight upward trajectory established by its predecessor Diversum.

While a touch of the avant-garde has persisted, the albums from In The Woods... in the past decade have felt most aptly categorizable as progressive black metal; when reviewing their previous release, I used ‘Enslaved-meets-Green Carnation’ as a succinct summary of Diversum. This time around, Enslaved don’t feel as relevant, partly because black metal is less of a factor (there’s snippets of extremity on every track, but only “The Things You Shouldn’t Know”, “The Crimson Crown” and “Come Ye Sinners” have prolonged blackened content), but also the songwriting in general bears few hallmarks of that band. Instead, I’d be slightly more inclined to label Otra as ‘Borknagar-meets-Green Carnation’, especially in some of the record’s more soaring moments.

One trend that Otra continues is ever-decreasing album length; since the 67 minutes of Pure, each album has been shorter than its predecessor, and at 47 minutes, Otra is concise in a manner that leaves little space for filler. Additionally, with the heightened melodic focus, the record does feel a bit more consistent throughout stylistically, particularly with vocalist Bernt Fjellestad holding his own more convincingly on his second outing with the group. He adds a gothic gloom to “The Kiss And The Lie” and the chorus of “The Things You Shouldn’t Know”, while swelling more voluminously in “A Misrepresentation Of I”, particularly when delivering lush harmonies.

It's perhaps a bit of a shame that those blackened touches have been more sidelined, as the harsh stretches in the already mentioned “The Things You Shouldn’t Know” add a nice contrast to the melancholia of the chorus, and work nicely in tandem with a scene-stealing solo that shines in the mid-section of the track. Additionally, the harsh/clean interplay in the chorus of “The Crimson Crown” does a good job of kicking that track into another gear following the simple, mellow verse. Still, the other songs don’t necessarily need more than the brief glimpses of aggression that they already feature; “A Misrepresentation Of I” is a neat mid-tempo stomper with a slight hint of Amorphis in its verses, while the briefest blackened surge in the bridge of “Let Me Sing” nicely complements the overall sorrowful folksy tone of the track.

I’ve found the previous reunion releases from In The Woods... to all be fairly reliably likeable, but also there’s something about their writing across the past decade that has never really threatened to spill over into true greatness. I do find myself in a similar position with Otra, in so much as there’s little here that I would be truly excited to revisit, but I do find pretty much every song to be enjoyable while it lasts, with the occasional moment that captures my attention well. On top of that, there’s not much here that drags the experience down; if there are weaknesses to point out, I might look first to “The Kiss And The Lie”, which has a bit of a personality schism between its generally subdued nature and the brief yet firm intensity of its pre-chorus.

A song that offers both highlights and lowlights within a 30-second window is “Come Ye Sinners”; although Fjellestad had received some mixed reactions to his debut with the group, I feel like he convincingly delivers pretty much everything he sets his mind to on Otra, with the exception of a bizarrely weak and nasal-sounding lower-register approach in the first half of this track’s chorus. It threatens to bury the song, but then he shifts up an octave and belts out the second half of the chorus atop a fantastical instrumental backdrop (reminds me in terms of melody of Tuomas Holopainen’s The Life And Times Of Scrooge album), and it really comes alive. The song in general is perhaps the weakest in the tracklist, but it does possibly contain the record’s peak.

It's still not quite a great record, but Otra is rather good, and perhaps the band’s strongest since Anders Kobro resurrected it. With this gradually improving form, it may be that there’s something special around the corner, but for now, there’s a solid amount to enjoy here.