Blut Aus Nord have built a career on refusal. Thirty years deep, sixteen albums in, and mastermind Vindsval still won’t settle into comfortable patterns or repeat himself with any predictability. Each record arrives like a different facet of the same strange crystal, refracting light in unexpected directions. You think you know what’s coming, and then Ethereal Horizons appears, all warmth and cosmic wonder where you might have expected industrial grinding or Lovecraftian horror.
This is their most openly melodic work since 2019’s Hallucinogen, though the comparison only tells half the story. Where that album turned inward, exploring altered states through psychotropic guitar work and mind-bending textures, Ethereal Horizons gazes skyward. The title delivers exactly what it promises: vast, star-scattered vistas rendered in waves of black metal that feel less like aggression and more like awe. Vindsval has spoken about his creative truth changing from day to day, and here he’s chasing something celestial, reaching for infinity rather than plumbing the depths.
Album opener Shadows Breathe First establishes the template immediately. Clean baritone vocals weave through traditional blackened snarls, a technique the band has employed since the Memoria Vetusta days but rarely with this much prominence. The guitars shimmer and cascade, building atmosphere through repetition rather than technical acrobatics. There’s a meditative quality to the riffing, patterns that hypnotize through their insistence. When the blast beats arrive, they feel less like violence and more like propulsion, rocket fuel for the journey ahead.
The production here represents a significant departure from the dissonant, deliberately unsettling approach of the Disharmonium albums. Everything sounds organic, warm even, with space between the instruments that allows each element to breathe. Seclusion demonstrates this beautifully, opening with synth swells that could soundtrack some lost science fiction film from the 1970s before W.D. Feld’s drumming kicks in with patterns that recall vintage drum machines yet maintain human feel. The groove that emerges is genuinely seductive, as close as this band has ever come to writing something you might actually bob your head to.
But Ethereal Horizons isn’t interested in easy pleasures. The Ordeal drifts through its runtime in a deliberately meandering fashion, refusing to commit to any single idea for very long. Fragments of melody surface and dissolve, bass lines pulse beneath wistful synthesizers, and the whole thing feels like watching clouds shift shape. Some listeners will find this frustrating; I found it oddly compelling, a willingness to embrace ambiguity that feels rare in a genre often obsessed with power and certainty.
Then The Fall Opens the Sky arrives and reorients everything. This track absolutely soars, building from steady percussion into rapturous clean vocals and ascending guitar lines that actually earn the adjective “heavenly.” There’s genuine emotion here, something approaching joy, which feels almost transgressive in the black metal context. The serene interlude at its centre offers a moment of pure peace before the music surges back, and for those few minutes, nothing else in the world matters.
The album’s back half continues this balancing act between beauty and bite. What Burns Now Listens ventures into post-rock territory without losing its metallic edge, all luminous bass work and vocals that seem to dissolve into the surrounding atmosphere. The brief instrumental Twin Sun Reverie functions as a palate cleanser, shimmering synth evoking impossible distances, before the nearly twelve-and-a-half-minute closer The End Becomes Grace arrives to justify its runtime.
That final track represents everything Ethereal Horizons attempts, for better and worse. When it works (and it mostly works), the song creates genuine transportive power, melodies that feel ancient and futuristic simultaneously, vocals that shift between harsh and clean with purpose rather than novelty. Ocean sounds and what might be whale song drift through the mix at one point, grounding all this celestial exploration in something earthly and familiar. When it spirals into its final crescendo, there’s a sense of having genuinely traveled somewhere, of returning changed.
Yet this album isn’t without its stumbles. Parts of What Burns Now Listens drag in ways that feel unintentional, losing momentum when the hypnotic quality tips into actual sleepiness. The emphasis on repetitive riffing works when it builds tension or creates mood, but occasionally it just feels like circling the same ideas without deeper revelation. There’s also something slightly lacking in menace here; the beauty overwhelms the darkness to the point where you might forget you’re listening to black metal at all.
Still, judging Blut Aus Nord against expectations has always been pointless. They’ve spent three decades confounding listeners who wanted them to stay in one lane, whether that’s the raw fury of Memoria Vetusta I, the industrial nightmare of The Work Which Transforms God, or the progressive sprawl of the 777 trilogy. Vindsval clearly made exactly the album he wanted to make, synthesizing elements from across the band’s history (the melodicism of Memoria Vetusta II, the cosmic scope of Cosmosophy, the atmosphere of Hallucinogen) into something that honours the past while refusing to repeat it.
Ethereal Horizons works best when absorbed as a complete piece, track order intact, volume turned up. Individual songs might feel incomplete or frustrating in isolation, but sequenced properly, they create genuine narrative flow. You start in one place and end somewhere else, genuinely transformed by the journey. There’s craft in that, a willingness to prioritize album-length experience over playlist-friendly singles that feels increasingly rare.
Maybe this won’t rank among Blut Aus Nord’s absolute peak achievements. Maybe Hallucinogen remains the more perfectly realized version of this cosmic vision, or the Disharmonium albums will prove more influential in the long run. But Ethereal Horizons offers something valuable: proof that a band this deep into their career can still surprise themselves, still find new territories to explore within their established sonic universe. After sixteen albums, Vindsval is still reaching, still refusing to settle. That restlessness alone deserves recognition, even if the results occasionally drift rather than soar.
Ethereal Horizons is out today via Debemur Morti Productions.
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