Seid will release Dystopolis on 11 December through ATMF, their sixth album, and the question behind it is not the usual one.
What remains of the individual, the band ask, when community, identity and human connection are all filtered through impersonal systems. Black metal has spent thirty years writing about forests and the devil as ways of refusing the modern world; naming the enemy as administration rather than Christianity is a sharper and less comfortable position.
The band has been at this since 2009 out of Stockholm, with five albums behind them and a line-up that leans on session players around a core of Seidr Jonsson, Par Johansson and Alex Purkis. That arrangement suits records written as arguments rather than as the output of a touring unit.
ATMF has the release, which places it with a label that treats black metal as a literary form. On a record called Dystopolis that is the right address.