Hailing from the cold mountains of Sweden Hyngwar brings us their first full length Eternal Glory. This is a raw and heavily melodic lo-fi black metal album with some acoustic passages to give it that folk touch. While not incredibly ground breaking, what you do have is hard hitting and well written black metal that gets the head nodding.
The horns of war greet you when you start the album, a long intro that morphs into a triumphant guitar riff and blood boiling drums alongside raw and ghastly vocals. The guitars are the main show for the album, real creative riffs that don’t get too repetitive and at times can be rather catchy, the drums on the other hand also have a very prominent sound on the album, with skeletal sounding snare and cymbals the blast beats just never get tiring. There’s only three tracks on the album, but they all have a lengthy run time totaling at just over 33 minutes. But the way the songs are written make it so that each track are broken up into passages, transitioning with different riffs or even an ambient acoustic passage like towards the ending of the second track Thunder of Sword and Shield. Its done very well and doesn’t draw back from the album at all.
Each track feels like its own tragic yet triumphant tale of battle and hardship, with the titles of each of the tracks helping aid the image. The last track Riding the Northern Wind, is probably my favorite and really shows what I mean. Almost feels like the tragic story of a ship with its crew lost out at sea, starting soft and somber with an acoustic guitar passage, only to leave familiar shores to go into the dark unfamiliar waters with the blast beats and more intense parts representing such. One’s imagination can really run wild with a release like this and you can tell a lot of creativity went into the making of this. The whole album feels like a journey and you feel very satisfied at the end of it.
It always impresses me when I find out acts like these are one man acts. They’re always so well played musically and the creative image is there. Very strong for a debut release as well and I found my self really enjoying the Hel out of this. The Viking nature of this album reminds me of a weirdly raw version of Bathory, its probably thanks to the album cover, but they both capture the heroic and epic nature of those stories in the music. Give this a listen it won’t disappoint.