Goatvöid Holokäust released Iron Reign of Satan on 30 October through NSM Prod, their second album and the first thing from them in seven years.
The arithmetic is the first thing to notice. Sixteen tracks, and the whole record runs under thirty seven minutes, which puts the average song a shade over two minutes. Gristle Pit is one minute eighteen. Procession is one minute six. Only two pieces pass three and a half.
That is a deliberate shape rather than an accident of short songs. A black metal album built this way has no room for an atmospheric introduction or a long outro, and the Swedish band appear to want the thing to pass through rather than settle.
The titles go somewhere stranger than the band name suggests. Tithonian Thalassomancy and Wearer of Diadems in the Azoic Dawn reach for geological epochs rather than the usual vocabulary, and Precambrian Satanism puts the two halves of the record's thinking in two words.
The band have been running since 2011 and the first album, Voidfurnace Imperator, came out in 2019.