Hordes of Sweden, your very own ETERNAL EVIL are back with another album! Just a few days ago, they released their second full-length record “The Gates Beyond Mortality” via French record label Listenable Records. This comes just a couple years after their debut album “The Warriors Awakening…Brings The Unholy Slaughter!” in 2019 through American record label Redefining Darkness Records. Considering that these young lads founded their band only four years earlier, it’s clear that they have been quite busy in the art of Thrash Metal. It’s even better that their style of Thrash Metal is laced with Black Metal lyrics about evil, murder, and the unholy occult. I definitely enjoyed listening to ETERNAL EVIL’s second album, so I will give you a short but comprehensive review as to why it’s so great.

The first track "Depths of a New Eternity" is an approximately 2 minute-long instrumental track with slow, rhythmic guitar strumming and tom drum beats. The following track is "Guerilla Warfare," and from the start, I was hit with SLAYER vibes. The guitar riffs and Adam Schmidt's skank beats reminded me of SLAYER's famous song "Angel of Death" from their third album "Reign in Blood," and Adrian's shouting vocals even closely resembled those of Tom Araya.

Although "Guerilla Warfare" is a fast song, we see the band slowing things down to a mid-tempo on the title track. There's no guitar solo from either Adrian or Tobias Lindström, but it's made up for with a heavy blast beat from Adam Schmidt. "Funeral Prayers" is also mid-tempo for the most part, but the Swedish lads transition back to their faster Thrash Metal pace near the end.

I definitely want to comment on the track "Desecration of Light," because the lyrics on it were something else. With Adrian shouting about inverting the cross and giving reverence to Lucifer himself, the song can't get any more Black Metal than that. "The Astral Below" and "Immolation" are two particularly special songs, because they have not one but two shredding guitar solos each. "Immolation" also had the fastest series of skank beats/double bass combos from Schmidt that I had ever heard on the album. ETERNAL EVIL then ends things with their longest track "The Cursed Trilogy." During the nearly 7 ½ minutes of this song, there are a couple of moments where you might think the song is over, but the band abruptly changed their tempo. This adds an element of surprise to "The Cursed Trilogy" and thus makes it an acceptable closing track despite its extensive length.

As a fan of Black Metal and Thrash Metal, I definitely feel that I got the best of both worlds listening to "The Gates Beyond Mortality." In this case, ETERNAL EVIL successfully fused the fast, aggressive instrumentation of Thrash Metal with the dark, evil, anti-Christian lyrics of Black Metal. You honestly can't go wrong with Extreme Metal bands of the Scandinavian scene. They're absolute masters at what they do, and ETERNAL EVIL just further proves my point. So please, for their sake as well as mine, make sure you listen to their newest album!