Nattverd – Tidloes Naadesloes
Release Date: 21st March 2025
Label: Soulseller Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Black Metal, Atmospheric Black Metal, Melodic Black Metal.
FFO: Tsjuder, Horna, Nordjevel, 1349, Whoredom Rife, Taake.
Review By: Rick Farley
From the frozen shores of Bergen, Norway, second wave inspired black metal band, Nattverd are set to release album number five on Soulseller records March 21st, 2025. Energetic, haunting, and dark, Tidloes Naadesloes continues the blistering ferocity of unrelenting hellfire hearkening to the simpler days of black metal, when it was solely about aggression, dark mood, and evil intentions.
Tidloes Naadesloes on the surface is pedal to the metal aggression creating a real sense of panic leaving little time to breath. Atmospherically, while it’s not immediately in your face with gobs of potency, its haunting, melancholic presence is under the surface lurking just below waiting to snatch you up and submerge you into the darkness. Dual style black metal vocals harshly croaked and screeched mixed in with spoken word adds a layer of unhinged to the vast dread. The music while menacing and intensely attacking is well crafted with plenty of nightmarish flourishes that keep everything a little more than just total destruction. Dark tremolo melodies that flutter while being punished by blast beats, hypnotic chord progression, touches of eeriness with plenty of musical flourishes that accentuate and elevate the turbulence to the highest levels. The sombre melodies play a key role in the balance of the record. It’s fucking gritty and absolutely nasty, but it can just as easily charm you with wishful illusion as it begins to shreds every bit of your flesh.
Easily the best track on the record, De Sviande Ord Vaagar Ikje For Sitt Liv is a gloomy, yet pummelling journey through the infernal bowels just below the frozen soundscape. Frosty melodies quiver rapidly through emotive chord progression. A bombardment of frigid airiness quickly shifts towards you as you navigate the bone chilling depths of darkness. The sense of spirited grandeur almost dances in between its memorable catchiness as it punishes you with hostility. A brief folky acoustic guitar passage drifts beautifully to the end.
On the downside, and this is probably just a personal complaint. Tidloes Naadesloes sits at a little over 46 minutes of album runtime. For me, that’s not really an issue if everything else makes sense. Track number nine, Naar Vi Har Dolket Guds Hjerte which is a Dødheimsgard cover song, completely derails my enjoyment of the records flow. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad cover by any means, I’m just struggling to understand why it is track nine out of ten. It’s a halting change of focus that’s hard to regain despite track ten, Ens Egen Grav being a superb song full of wickedness, which closes out the record to pronounced effect. If you skip from track eight to ten, it’s automatically a better listen. Again, could just be me.
Tidloes Naadesloes was recorded at Caliban Studios and mixed and mastered by Reuben Willem. The production is modern, with enough clarity to satisfy that cleaner production crowd and with enough rawness to possibly satisfy the old heads. There’s an oppressive amount of ambience that melds itself together in a way that the album comes across as exceedingly suffocating without muddiness. Either way, it sounds nasty as fuck in the best way possible.
Despite this record being something that will feel similar to many albums you’ve heard before, Nattverd are proficient at writing with the essence of 90s black metal putting a little modern spin to it. Enough so that if the cover song had been left off completely, I probably would have gone a little higher. Tidloes Naadesloes still stands as a highly enjoyable black metal record that easy to return to. Devilry afoot.
(3.5 / 5)
