I, Scvlptor is an EP, a good one, and a thin one: of its eight tracks, three are songs that had never been released before, and one of those three is played twice. The quartet with thirteen studio albums already standing in its gallery, Behemoth, has thrown open the gates of its own marble yard and dragged out whatever was lying in it, two figures never shown before, cut clean, two statues from the 1990s hauled down and recut, one block left over from the last commission, two copies carved after other masters, and a second showing of one of those figures with the chisel still resting against the stone.
Released on 4 September 2026, sixteen months after The Shit Ov God, played by the same four men who made that album, Nergal on vocals and guitar, Inferno on drums, Orion on bass and Seth on second guitar, and sleeved in artwork by Bartek Rogalewicz, I, Scvlptor is not the fourteenth studio album and does not pretend to be. It is a compilation assembled around a small core of unreleased music, two reworked relics from the foundations of the catalogue, a pair of tributes and one alternate mix, and the only question worth putting to a release built this way is whether the core is strong enough to carry everything stacked around it. Three songs. The test is short.
"I, Scvlptor" passes it outright. The title track opens the record and carries it, a riff that cleaves the block along its grain instead of dressing the surface, blackened death metal of full weight, driven hard enough to splinter every softer idea the EP entertains later, and a lyric built on the image the whole package leans on, a self that is sculpted and never finished, only worked on again. It is the best song here by a distance. Nothing after it matches its mass.
"Lord ov the Horizons" is the one that leaves the band's own pattern. It splits in two, clean and half sung passages on one side and a harder, marching half on the other, and it is the most adventurous thing Behemoth has put on this record, a song that tries a shape the band does not usually cut. The attempt is real. It is also the song the running order leans on twice.
Old marble, recut
Two of the seven studio tracks go back to the foundations of the lineage. "Rise of the Blackstorm of Evil" comes from the 1993 demo The Return of the Northern Moon, "In Thy Pandemaeternvm" from Pandemonic Incantations in 1998, and both have been hauled out of the cellar, scrubbed and recut with the tools the band owns now: every drum stroke defined, every guitar layer separated, the old murk scoured away. That is the trade, and it cuts both ways. Clarity is bought with the obscurity that was half of what the originals meant, and on "Rise of the Blackstorm of Evil" the price shows, a demo that once sounded dug out of frozen ground now standing in gallery light, harder, cleaner and a little less haunted.
The unseen figures are the reason to come. The rest is the yard.
"In Thy Pandemaeternvm" is where the exercise earns its keep. A sepulchral figure from the band's earliest black metal years, lifted from its niche with the grime of twenty eight years on it and recut in white stone so that every line of the arrangement stands forward in full light, it is the one recording here that improves decisively on its source, and the only argument on the record for re-recording anything at all. "Begotten" is the block from the last commission, cut during the sessions for The Shit Ov God and left out of that album. It is solid work and it sits in the yard like what it is.
Copies after other masters
Then the copies, which are what a marble yard sells when the sculptor is between commissions. "In League with Satan (Venom cover)", with Shagrath of Dimmu Borgir on guest vocals, is the better of the two by some margin, a copy after Venom cut with the right amount of disrespect, the old crudeness hammered into something a stage can use. "The Return of Darkness and Evil (Bathory cover) (live)", recorded in Athens in 2026 with Sakis Tolis of Rotting Christ as the guest, is a souvenir of a night rather than a sculpture, faithful to Bathory and no more than that.
The fault is the ending. "Lord ov the Horizons (Rough mix)" closes the record with the same song heard six tracks earlier, now unfinished, the chisel marks left on the face. The idea fits the title, a sculptor showing the block before the last pass, and it is an idea that holds for exactly one listen. On an EP carrying three unreleased songs, handing one slot in eight to a second draft of one of them is not a revelation of method. It is padding with a concept attached.
For anyone who follows this band album by album, I, Scvlptor is worth owning for "I, Scvlptor" and "In Thy Pandemaeternvm", and those two tracks are better than the EP that holds them. For anyone waiting on the fourteenth studio album, nothing here changes the wait: it is a yard sale from a workshop still in full production, the finest pieces priced beside the offcuts, and ignoring it costs one very good song and one old one finally cut properly.