Four songs. That is the entire tracklist of the ninth full-length album from Taake, the same four-chapter arithmetic the project used on Et hav av avstand in 2023, and almost every argument about En skog av nidstang turns out to be an argument about what four long pieces owe the listener who stays with them to the end.
The last man still holding the Taake name, Hoest, did not carry this one into a studio. Recorded, mixed and produced by Bjørnar Erevik Nilsen of Vulture Industries and Black Hole Generator in the moss-covered forests around the island of Borgøy, mastered by Borknagar guitarist Øystein G. Brun and released through Dark Essence Records on 31 July 2026, the record was made with rudimentary tools and in deliberate confinement, the modern studio's machinery hacked off the process like bark stripped from green timber. It sounds like it. Trees make poor acoustic treatment, and nobody involved appears to have minded.
The title translates roughly as a forest of nithing poles, and the níðstang was Norse anathema in its most physical form: a pole of scorn with a horse's head fixed on top. Picture four of them, raw timber driven into the moss at the edge of a neighbour's field, each carved with the same crooked riff, a lacerating voice nailed to the crown of every one like the skull, all four turned toward the house and left standing to grind the household down by nothing more than persistence. That is this record. A curse pole has no chorus. It has time, and the only question worth asking is how much.
Four poles, four jobs
The materials are the ones Taake has always worked with: raw and melodic riffs in that familiar twanging voicing, bent slightly out of true, breaking without warning into progressive and post-rock turns and into passages of folk and traditional instrumentation. Hoest's harsh voice, a bark and a howl that tear at the throat, remains the record's surest weapon, matched at moments by a flatter, mid-ranged croon worked in against it. What separates it from the genre's standing army is the refusal of verse and chorus. Each piece unfolds as a chapter rather than a song, with no refrain to come home to.
"Einstoeingen og eg" opens the door by walking out of the genre first, Americana licks summoning a desert before tremolo-picked black metal comes down and razes it flat. Deathspell Omega discord, Khold groove and nineties Darkthrone rawness sit packed into the same opener, which closes on a solo in melancholy clean guitar. It reads as a statement of intent, and it is the boldest misdirection on the album.
"Et dyr tok min hud" does the dirty work, built with Hoest's distinctive hand and splintering at its middle into something very close to chaos. An unconventional instrument surfaces partway through to widen the composition. This is where the forest grows thickest and the path is hardest to see.
"Engler" is the pole that carries the most weight and the most praise: the album's great slow-burner, heavier riffing resolving into melodic endings, and the finest thing in the Taake catalogue in years. Nilsen guests on vocals here, and the drums pound with real force underneath it. Built slowly and struck hard, the song drives each riff home the way a mallet splits the crown of a stake: one blow, a pause long enough to lift the arm again, then the next.
"Av guds ville naade" closes the record on repetition, hypnotic and mantra-like, the pull paying off fully only in this final song. Clean vocals surface here as sinister as everything around them. It is the album's most persuasive closing argument, and also exactly where the charge of overreach lands hardest.
What a curse costs
The charge is length, and this is where the album divides a room: whole segments run long enough to test patience, and the case for trimming toward an EP is a real one; the same repetition can be heard instead as material earning its space, never once tipping into indulgence. Both readings are describing the same four poles. The patient reading is closer to the truth, but not by the whole distance: repetition is the curse doing its work, right up to the moment it becomes a riff going round the stake one more time than the curse requires.
Repetition is the curse doing its work, right up to the moment it becomes a riff going round the stake one more time than the curse requires.
The sound is the second fault line, and this is where the record divides opinion again: a hollow, piercing clarity that goes straight through the skull, or grimmer, flatter textures, or a balance struck between windswept edge and real punch, depending which the ear catches on a given day. The truest reading is that the mix runs top-heavy and thin in the low end at times. A forest recording can afford to lose the polish. It cannot afford to lose the floor under the riffs, and in places this one does. The drumming stays standard for the genre, disciplined enough to pass for a machine.
This may be the finest record carrying the Taake name since Noregs vaapen in 2011, and on the strength of "Engler" and "Av guds ville naade" that is not far from proven. En skog av nidstang is for listeners who want black metal as an act of patience and malice at once, a curse planted and left to work. Its failures are measured in minutes, never in nerve. Anyone who skips it for its length will miss the most singular record this project has made in years, and anyone who hears it through will know exactly which lengths of timber could have stayed in the forest.