2026 hasn’t really regurgitated a great crop of dyed-in-the-wool, daemon-infected Black Metal records. At least on the RMR webzine, it didn’t. There’s no sign of the feisty French branch of heretical metal to date. Apart from this act, perhaps. And they’re from Sweden, which fits the current contender’s profile pretty well. But even if nothing much has been happening in the filthy old realms where the stinking breath reigns, we want moar, much moar.
But never fear, there’s always something cooking in the Scandinavian outback. And here we found ourselves a devilishly good bonfire in the Swedish outfit Flykt1 and their newest piece, Sinister Strain. With OId Nick staring straight at you from an innuendo-laden album cover. And why is he getting all the blondes? Just asking.
And sinister the record is indeed. In fact, the piece is the epitome of rage issues that no anger management course can fix. The masters that be over at the charnel house deliver an abundance of atmospherics spread over Black Metal antics that not only slightly recall old masters like Burzum2 or Gorgoroth3, but also more recent ones such as Isolert, Darkend, or – again – Watain. Admittedly, this is a lot of name-calling right there. But this also tells us that this band freely taketh from what existed before and absorbs it into Sinister Strain’s underground-infused and thrash-infested brand of powerful Black Metal.
And clearly, nothing on Sinister Strain‘s overly lengthy 55 minutes of airplay hasn’t been heard somewhere before. There’s no danger of copycat, though, it is just that many a band on Black Metal’s decade-old journey has traversed the spectrum of the traditional Black Metal fare. If anything, you get Joel Geffen‘s in-your-face and brutally efficient riffing with David Ekevärn‘s furious drumming to back it up. But it is Andreas Lind‘s snarls and rasps that truly carry the blackened flag on this record.
And yet, the tasty injection of a fair amount of dissonance combined with atmospheric and – for sure – ambient injections will finally create some sort of a terrifying, hellish miasma. Something that starts to feel like some sort of sonic impersonation of Astaroth’s bad breath-infested devilish council. Need an example for that? Just head over to the fillet piece of Sinister Strain‘s tracklist, the baroquely named Armed With Countless Daimons Seeking Abode. A concoction of tastily portioned Swedish metal extremes, complete with dissonant excursions baked into the typical Black Metal savagery. And it peters out with enough atmospherics and ambients to lose yourself in some cosmic thought experiments. A track that, in many ways, showcases the record’s essence best, in case you’re short on time and patience to go for the full length on offer.
Because patience, you will need. Flykt here forgot to hit the self-edit button more than a few times. The result is a largely meandering piece with a knack for revisiting sub-themes all over again for felt eons. To add insult to injury, the band lost itself in a ton of some kind of blackened atmospheric doom, and way too much of it. And that lost them the path to greatness, I daresay. And this transformed the 14-minute behemoth There Comes The Light into a tedious affair. Specifically, the last few minutes filled with a meandering soundscape of atmospherics and ambients had us scratching our heads. Only die-hard adepts will listen to this track more than a couple of times in its entirety.
In the end, Sinister Strain has a lot to offer. You’ll find a record full of feisty down-in-the-pit Black Metal of the kind that takes no prisoners. A pretty impressive feat of songsmithing that won’t forget the old masters but offers a tastily constructed album with just enough modern metal nuggets to please the younger crowd. If only they’d used the dreaded carving knife to get rid of the abundant fat supply and convoluted nonsense, this record would have landed at a much higher ranking than it actually did.
And this, folks, truly is a pity.
Record Rating: 7/10 | Label: Hammerheart Records | Web: Official Band Site
Release Date: 19 June 2026