From: The Kill Chain

Published: January 11, 2021 

Originally released last summer, the third album from Canadian depressive black metaller Nordicwinter ‘Desolation’ sees a rerelease on CD through Hypnotic Dirge Records in January, a perfect time of the year for cold and bleak music.

Opener ‘Forest of Despair’ meets you with cold clean tones and slowly builds into a gloomy, slow paced buzz where a haunted shriek echoes from beneath a burying fog. The music saps your energy, leaving you feeling cold and alone, and there’s parts of the shadowy ‘In Solitude’ that you begin to feel truly lost in the album’s dark journey. What also deserves a lot of praise is that even though the songs are generally quite long they’re nowhere near long enough for you to lose your attention on them. The ehavier moments of ‘All That Remains’ transitioning into the cold clean tones again and then back is probably my favourite moment here. It maintains the weight but adds a fragility which is apparent throughout and comes into play in the (almost hopeful) ‘Tomb of Silence’.

My only criticism is that some songs do that almost immediate fadeout at the end, rather than either an abrupt obvious stop or a longer fadeout. It is a tiny nitpick though, and it barely detracts from the excellent work here. Nordicwinter really captures the true bleakness of the wintry north, and suck the joy and hope from the air around you. Grab ‘Desolation’ before the perfect weather for this sort of misery dissipates.

Reviewed by: Sandre the Giant