Hammerheart Records have put the whole of After Chaos: Nocturnal Vigil online. The album came out on 18 September and runs one hour and twenty six minutes across eight tracks, and Runemagick is still one person: Nicklas Rudolfsson, credited with vocals, guitars, bass, synthesizers, jaw harp and drums.
The eight pieces are grouped into four movements with names of their own. The Stillness After Collapse holds After Chaos and Rune Magick Unbound, Vigil Beneath the Weave holds The Nocturnal Vigil and Urðr's Cosmic Weave, Continuity Beyond Form holds Abyssal Continuum and Formless Dawn, and Dissolution into the Unbounded closes with The Vast That Knows No Shape and Into the Endless Continuance. The whole is subtitled a journey through the cosmic weave of Urðr, in two parts, Urðr being the Norn who holds what has already happened.
The shortest track is seven and three quarter minutes and the opener is thirteen and a half. The label's instruction alongside the stream is to step away from the present, listen in solitude and give the record time, which is the sort of thing a label writes and in this case also a fair description of what an hour and a half of death and doom at this tempo requires.
It is the fifteenth Runemagick full length. The band started in 1990, stopped in 2007, and has been running again since 2017, and Rudolfsson took the drums back himself last year.