Nine years of silence from a band that never explained itself, and then a guitar comes out of the dark with a melody on it. Isenblåst have unveiled "Beyond the Veil of Light", the first piece of Destructing the Constraints of Time, their second album, due on 12 January through W.T.C. Productions on CD and vinyl.
The record holds ten tracks. It follows Screams in Cold Silence from 2017, the debut that came after a formative decade of demos and EPs, and which read as second wave black metal done with a crooked ear for riff writing: rough, hostile, unpredictable in its arrangements. The band then went back under. A few live appearances kept them on the map while the second full length refused to appear.
By the label's account the new one is no departure. The songwriting is tighter, the playing sharper, and the thing that has changed most is the lead guitar, which now climbs out of the rhythm rather than sitting buried in it. Melodic lines carry their own weight through the songs, and the arrangements swing between the majestic and the plainly vicious while the riffs keep shifting underneath.
W.T.C. reach for Nifelheim as the comparison, and specifically for the way that band folded mid eighties South American extreme metal into their own. Isenblåst began in 2009 and have Austenitized Records behind the back catalogue.