Bringing us their debut demo, Mitternacht makes a blasphemous deceleration of war, presenting a solid textbook example of second wave black metal done flawlessly in the modern-age. While what is done here isn’t anything ground breaking or new, its refreshing to hear that the true cold soul of black metal still lingers around in this day and age, with out it being muddied up by useless cross genre additions or having overly noisy production to get in with the ‘raw’ crowd. This is black metal in its purest form.
While this demo only really sports 3 songs, they’re all written and performed flawlessly. With out knowing any better, one could easily mistake this as an old, lost, forgotten band from some cold reaches of Scandinavia, but in fact, this only came out two years ago, 2021. The riffs are cold, yet catchy, the drums are solid from the fast paced blast-beats to the more slower and mid-tempo passages, and even the chilling vocals. All of it nails what black metal truly should sound like. The production is on that perfect balance of dirty lofi edginess to clean and crisp where each instrument can truly be enjoyed. The riffs themselves aren’t just lifted from previous acts, but there are some striking similarities I feel like, especially along the Darkthrone or Burzum route. There’s just something distinctly ‘Varg’ sound about these guitars that I can’t really place my finger on, but they’re just different enough to really stand on their own.
While, the demo is short lived, its certainly impactful and should be thoroughly enjoyed by any trve black metal kvltist. I found my self repeating these tracks over and over again and still have yet to be tired of it. They truly scratch that black metal itch and I’m anxiously awaiting any new material from this band. Hopefully the sound grows just a bit more, but stays trve to the roots of the genre as has been clearly shown here. Must listen for sure.