A Niding To Nothing

From Horten, Norway emerges the black metal band Nidingr – a band that’s been in the scene all the way since 1992. Nidingr released a demo in 1999, and their debut album was out in 2005, titled Sorrow Infinite And Darkness. In 2010 they released their second album, Wolf-Father, and only two years later they released their third album Greatest Of Deceivers.

Nidingr is a band that let themselves grow naturally over time and when they release and album it’s in good belief that it’ll be a great contribution to the top tier world of metal music.

They are now releasing their fourth album in 2017, titled The High Heat Licks Against Heaven, an album drenched in Norse mythology, and names from the younger and older Edda appears throughout in the lyrics. The album drifts in the middle of black and death metal, but with the Norse theme it creates a unique and fresh breath of sound. To put it mildly, this is a brutal and honest metal record.

The album was being worked on intensely for two years, where they took a deep dive into the old English translations of the older and younger Edda from the 18^th century. They are continuously striving towards authenticity and shapes the music partly around the theme and the text material, which in broad terms talks about the great and classical themes like death, afterlife, war and the many majestic personalities from the mythology. The band states that in a thematic world like this they have chosen to take a more theatric approach to their material. In addition it is relevant to mention that they wrote the text material and music separately and sculpted them together in the meeting of those two afterwards.

The songs are characterized by heavy riffs in a glassy but dirty sound, with at times some melodies with melancholic atmospheres, steady tempi with an almost marching undertone. The vocals hangs on in the top of the sound wall with a drive, power and quality one rarely hears. With Cpt.Estrella Grasa on vocals, Teloch (Mayhem, Gorgoroth, God Seed) on guitar, Destructhor (Myrkskog, Morbid Angel) on backing vocals, Myrvoll on drums and SIR (Gaahls Wyrd, Trelldom, God Seed) on bass, the music is shaped to a monolith of an album in an unmitigated an authentic style.

The High Heat Licks Against Heaven (2017)