We tried to push ourselves to musical horizons that we have touched or hinted at before, but now try to fully embrace and indeed give ourselves over to a deeper instinctual urge.”
It takes a vision of some distinction to stand out amid an unerringly over-populated black metal scene. Gelderland (NL) iconoclasts Solar Temple made it look easy with their 2018 debut album, Fertile Descent: a kaleidoscopic, deep-dive grimoire with atmosphere, melody and a chewable sense of spectral dread, it defied extreme metal’s in-built conservatism and conjured a sonic world with no boundaries beyond an intuitive devotion to the dark. At Roadburn Redux, Solar Temple have upped the pitch-black, transcendental ante even further.
Tracklist A: Part I 21:00 B: Part II 17:11 C: Part III 12:46 D: Part IV 9:21