Heimdalls Wacht release their ninth album on 31 October through Talheim Records. It is called Sphärenschänder: Echoes of an Old Belief, Part I, and the guardian of the title wakes from a bad sleep into a present he cannot read.
What follows him through the record is bewilderment, then melancholy, then anger, and a search for whatever is left of an older way of knowing things. The Germans have been writing about nature, vanished cultures, paganism and not belonging for a long time, and this is the same argument with a character attached to it.
The music stays raw and melodic where it always was, and takes in folk, doom, some progressive shape and a little thrash and death metal, so the rage and the reflection sit next to each other rather than in separate songs.
The band call their own outlook neo-Romantic and mean it literally: Ludwig Tieck on nature, E.T.A. Hoffmann on the worse parts of being a person, and the nihilism that goes under the name of Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann.