Band:	Bloody Valkyria
Album:	In Our Home, Across The Fog
Style:	Folk black metal, Melodic black metal
Release date:	April 04, 2025
A review by:	musclassia

01. The Fallen Leaves Tell A Story
02. Imbued With The Rune Of Death
03. Tale Of House Hoslow
04. From Stormveil To Liurnia
05. Radahn Festival
06. May Chaos Take The World
07. The Loyal Half-Wolf
08. Age Of The Stars

From a kingdom in fire to a home across the fog, the freshly formed folk/black metal project Bloody Valkyria is going from strength to strength in its nascent stages.

There’s limited information available about this Finnish one-man band, which emerged with limited fanfare last year before promptly dropping Kingdom In Fire, a worthy nominee and staff pick in last year’s Folk / Pagan / Viking Metal category of the Metal Storm Awards, nor its sole member and producer Jere Kervinen. There’s more information to glean about the theme of Bloody Valkyria’s albums; the use of Silmarillion quotes and the presence of what I assume is Minas Tirith on the album cover places Kingdom In Fire firmly in Tolkien territory, but just half a year on, Kervinen has shifted universes to the world of Elden Ring for In Our Home, Across The Fog.

One-man bands have a tendency to be quite prolific (hell, if I could play all instruments and also produce, I’d be putting out albums far more frequently than I currently do); they also can exhibit signs of roughness on the production front in their early records as they learn the ropes, particularly if they’re self-producing. Although it didn’t significantly hamper its enjoyability, there was a clear roughness to Kingdom In Fire, but Kervinen is clearly learning quickly, as In Our Home, Across The Fog sounds a lot fuller and cleaner, with the keyboards also mixed in more naturally with the metal guitars (the mastering work from Jarno Hänninen also shouldn’t be discounted). With a more sympathetic mix, the songs are primed to make an even greater impact than those on the debut, and by and large I find this new release is equal to or superior in quality to its predecessor.

Stylistically, new listeners can expect a folksy brand of quasi-extreme yet melodic metal that is rooted in meloblack/atmo-black, while also drawing some elements from melodeath. To go with this is a healthy dollop of dungeon synth and symphonic orchestration to lend the album an even more epic vibe. The blackened folk is of the more grandiose and majestic variety, bearing hints of similarity to the likes of Saor, Sojourner and Skyforest. Opening track “The Fallen Leaves Tell A Story” has quite the extended symphonic introduction, but once the metal arrives, it’s fairly full-pelt and blasting, bringing a good level of riff memorability alongside the choral and keyboard garnishes. The story is much the same with “Imbued With The Rune Of Death”, whose soaring tremolo melodies capture a similar epic grandeur to Saor and Sgàile, while its more elaborate guitar leads and solos stack up ably to the rest of the composition.

The album remains stylistically quite similar throughout: ever epic, ever heaped up with majestic accompaniments to the metallic core, and ever serving up plenty of black-tinged folk melody in the riffs and guitar leads. There is some fluctuation in pace, as “Tale Of House Hoslow” and later “Age Of The Stars” broadly stick to more moderate tempos, while there’s a romping energy to the opening minutes of 13-minute “May Chaos Take The World” that reminds me a smidge of earlier Wintersun. At whatever pace, the compositions are consistently memorable and entertaining; In Our Home, Across The Fog is a blast pretty much throughout. If one were to nitpick, there’s perhaps a lack of internal flow to some of the tracks that break themselves up with dungeon synth/orchestral interludes (looking at “May Chaos Take The World” and “Imbue With The Rune Of Death”), and it does feel unnecessary to sandwich that aforementioned 13-minute epic between two short dungeon synth tracks when the album otherwise eschews such interlude-style pieces.

That aside, this new record is a strong progression from the solid foundation laid by Kingdom In Fire, and with such a quick turnaround time between releases, there seems to be little immediate danger of Bloody Valkyria running out of satisfying hooks. In Our Home, Across The Fog is an easy album to recommend to any folk metal or meloblack fans.