Myrkur - M (2015)

Literally every time I have sat down to make a blog post over the last month I have been like 'NOW is it time to write about Myrkur's album M?' and every time I have been like, 'No, not yet' and now it is 2016 already. This is one of the most hauntingly beautiful and finely orchestrated metal albums I have ever heard, with black metal sections, blastbeats, growls, nocturnal screeches fluidly transitioning to chamber music sections, brass, chorales, silvery clouds of near-ambient reflected sonics. This album sounds like an album, like one sustained piece of musick, perfect for the chills and the fogs and the precipitations of our non-winter, but just as perfect for when the non-winter suddenly and without warning collapses into actual winter or into spring. This has folks from Dodheimsgard and Mayhem all over it, including current Mayhem guitarist Teloch, also of Nidingr, Chris Amott from Arch Enemy in a guest spot, and conceived alongside and produced by Garm of Ulver, who sees his work with Myrkur as a way of engaging with Black Metal without making it directly himself. With all of the assistance from Black Metal aristocracy, this is Myrkur's album, and hers alone. This is her vision, and there is nothing else like in metal today. The dreamy, the hazy, the tonally unfixed and smeared, this has been a part of Black Metal since Quorthon got his Kate Bush mixed up with his Venom records. To stand with beauty, with wonder, with amazement, with not knowing what we are going to experience next, and against any sort of fixed, unchanging orthodoxy. Here is a bonus track by Myrkur which was released as an Adult Swim single after M came out: It sounds mournful and magisterial and honestly a little scary all at once.