In 2002, Norwegian juggernauts IMMORTAL released “Sons of Northern Darkness”.  The album ushered in a new millennium for metal, a genre that still was crawling out of the hairspray and tight pants of the 1980s as it left the crushed cans and torn garments of the ‘90s mixed amongst the bodies of the dead. IMMORTAL’s blackened crush wasn’t the first iconic album to come out of the early ‘00s, but it was one of the first that flexed its muscles in such a confident, unabashedly melodic way.  While it was still the sound of a blackened night over a Scandinavian winter sky, it was also the sound of the snow as it covered the undulating hills of a country at one with its pagan self.  It was celebratory more than repugnant; ambient more than abrasive; melodic more than dissonant. In some ways, it changed the trajectory of black metal. And that trajectory, it seems, has crossed the rough, mountainous terrain border between Norway and Sweden to SVARTKONST, the sonic exploration of one-man band Rickard Törnqvist.

The sonic efficacy of Törnqvist’s third full-length “May the Night Fall” can be measured through a short, two-minute burst of black metal chaos.  Second song “Breath of Satan” features one of the nastiest, dissonant riffs you’ll hear all year, a relentless tremolo-picked blast of minor key mayhem. It leans heavy into the fuck-it-all punk rock attitude of DARKTHRONE but with all the menacing, no-nonsense Satan-inspired attitude of ENTOMBED or IMMORTAL.  After the blistering second song, SVARTKONST slows it down a bit to a mid-tempo homage to the bloody middle finger. “Straight to the Grave” doesn’t so much rock as it swags: Törnqvist’s well-enunciated paeans to misery are still understood through the blackened growls, and the song has about as near to a vocal hook as you’ll ever find in such darkness. Speaking of swagger, “Filth Worship” brings the gothic sexuality of TYPE O NEGATIVE to the vinyl slab, although that filth isn’t just limited to dark rooms lit up by the orange and black screen of PornHub, but a world’s worth of filth, be it human or human-built.  Even the riffage on “Filth Worship” is downright filthy, making for a pretty powerful bit of melodic black metal.

Will “May the Night Fall” put the black metal scene on notice? Probably not, but it is certainly capable of putting Rickard Törnqvist’s live iteration of SVARTKONST higher up the bill on summer festivals. There’s something searingly confident about the ten songs thrown together on “May the Night Fall” that separates it from the pack of black metal albums that have been released this year.  The riffage is clean, yet dissonant; the vocals miserable yet palatable; and the rhythm sections pummels along with such efficacy that it becomes a hurricane wind of bass and drums. Like IMMORTAL, SVARTKONST has created something that may become forever frozen in the permafrost of the northern darkness, a frozen fist in the air as Satan’s heat causes the ice to slowly, slowly melt.