Band:	Slægt
Album:	Goddess
Style:	Black metal, Blackened heavy metal
Release date:	March 2022

01. Deceived By An Amethyst
02. Kiss From A Knife
03. Hunt Again
04. Fealty, Thunder Whip
05. Stabat Bloody Stabat
06. Goddess

Only a black metal band can make heavy metal sound gloomy and rotten.

I'm having more and more reservations in calling Slægt a black metal band. Sure, they started out as such and that is still a major component of their sound, but 2015's Ildsvanger is the only album of theirs I'd unquestionably call black metal, and even that had the heavy metal and d-beat influences seeping in. 2017's Domus Mysterium and 2018's The Wheel created such amazing marriages of these sounds that I'm surprised they didn't generate a bigger paradigm shift towards even more ambitious blackened heavy merges. But what ended up happening was that Slægt switched labels to a major one and took an even longer break in between releases, as crafting a follow-up to The Wheel must've been a daunting task.

As daunting as a task as it was, I don't think it's much of a surprise that Goddess is a slight step down from it, though that says more about how great The Wheel was rather than Goddess being in any way underwhelming. And it's not even like it's either too much of a rehash or a left-turn that forgot what made the initial run so great. In fact, it might prove even more ambitious that The Wheel, with a lot of the songwriting taking even more cues from goth and prog rock. One band that I am getting increasingly reminded of, both in sound and trajectory, is Sweden's Tribulation, another extreme metal band that gradually seeped into gothic heavy metal, while retaining a bit of their extreme metal roots as a flair. And it's hard to listen to "Kiss From A Knife" and not hear the similarities.

The vocals still remain firmly in black metal territories, sounding more like barks than anything resembling shrieks, and the riffing often features the trademark tremolo picking. However every time a solo comes around, it's some of the most fast-cars-and-sunglasses NWOBHM worship out there. I'm making it sound more contradictory and disjointed than it is, but few bands could take this kind of heavy metal, and make it sound exhumed instead of old. It sounds like a reanimated corpse, which I guess goes hand in hand with the goth overtones of the music and the ghoulish vocals. And the interaction between the styles is aided even more by how well Slægt balance intricacies in songwriting and textures, and just throttling the metal pedal. Basically it pedals to the metal very esoterically.

A lot of music does work in contrasts. Black and white. Light and dark. Slægt use the contradiction in their sound as a means of sounding even more sinister. Sometimes it detracts, sometimes the synergy is majestic. With every subsequent listen, it's more of the latter.