From their EPK, “There are nights when the world holds its breath... in that stillness, something stirs, distant, wordless, like a shape in the cold fog, a pull beneath the ribs... and you find yourself facing an enigmatic project you’d never heard of, yet it carries a force, a depth, a quiet magnificence. That project is DOS, a vision born in the shadowed wilds of Sweden by a solitary spirit tracing the ghost-lines of forgotten gods, ancient myths and the primal darkness of the North. His debut full-length album, “Det eviga och den döde,” draws from two early 19th-century poems by Esaias Tegnér, reshaped as five songs of atmospheric black metal vast as the sky, dark and minimalistic, shaped by cold silence and shadow, drifting like mist through the bones of forsaken forests.”

The album has five lengthy songs, and “Det eviga I” is first. At first, the Black Metal roots to the FWOBM are evident in the thick wall of guitars, the screechy vocals, and the blast beat drumming. The landscape they paint is one of utter frigid temperatures, and no human in sight for many, many moons. “Det eviga II” builds a more sinister sound, and it eases in slowly, with a lot of tension. Your mind races…what is around the corner? The full weight of the song begins to descend onto your shoulders, then your back, and it slowly crushes you. The sound grows with the added weight of desolation and despair each moment it moves forward, and it is torturous.

“Den dode I” is another horridly dreadful affair, and it sounds to me like someone who is stuck in a nightmare and can’t wake up. The vocal screams could wake the dead, and the music is harrowing enough to turn your hair white. The sound drops at the middle, but tension remains, before it roars back like a fire with accelerants added. “Den dode II” is equally as frightening, and tortuous, two things that the album does very well. The slower pace of this song really allows the creepy aspects of the music to sink it, and cover every nook and cranny of your psyche. “Den dode III” is the final song, and it’s a faster burn this time, the kind that lights your skin on fire from the start, resulting in a searing pain that stays with you throughout the song.

Some people talk about a concept called “the burning cold,” which is a poetic or metaphorical phrase that describes an intense, paradoxical sensation—cold so extreme that it feels like burning. It's often used to capture the sharp, biting nature of freezing temperatures, where the skin can sting or ache, much like it does when exposed to heat. That sums up the sound on the album perfectly for me.