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HULDER
Verses In Oath

20 Buck Spin (2024)
Rating: 9/10

Three years after her mesmeric black metal debut full-length album Godslastering: Hymns Of A Forlorn Peasantry, Washington-based Belgium-born musician Hulder (aka Marliese Osborne) sweeps us up in another dark yet enchanting cloud.

The clever part regarding the Hulder sound is its ability to be at once savage and harsh (especially in the vocal tone) as well as haunting. This album has such an ethereal quality, even through the icy drizzle and ear-scraping vocal rasps. In fact, throughout the duration of this outing I felt like I was being enticed into the lair of a witch whose vile, haggard features were masked by some spell to soften the foreboding sense of consuming frost and darkness.

These feelings were apparent immediately from opener ‘Boughs Ablaze’ as the ripping guitar acts like a blasting permafrost. However, this isn’t your basic black metal exercise because Hulder is more than adept at lacing the assaults with synths, and also throwing out some killer mid-tempo shifts, but everything served up feels epic yet spectral with ‘Lamentation’ and ‘An Offering’ acting as dividers to the atmospheric onslaughts.

Flashes of operatic grandeur, meditative stark notions, and utterly despairing blizzards all blend to result in a finely balanced mix of the melancholic, the delicate and the outright bleak and destructive, even with the folky lacings. Of course, it’s still hypnotic black metal, but the many other ingredients added suggest a genius at work and that’s a bold statement from myself.

My favourite track here has to be the nightmarish ‘Cast Into The Well Of Remembrance’, but pluck any track from this 40-minute slab and be swallowed by a blanket of sound that caresses and claws in equal measure.

Neil Arnold

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