Album review: Winterfylleth – The Unyielding Season

Crackling like England’s endless waterways in the depths of winter, ice flows forever through the veins of Winterfylleth. Having underlined their credentials as Britain’s pre-eminent smithies of surging black metal with 2024’s The Imperious Horizon – a record that hinted at Tolkienesque darkness lurking on the horizon – superb ninth album The Unyielding Season finds the Northern lads channelling the wildfire of that threat becoming reality.

But some crusty exercise in sword and sorcery this is not. Exploding into action with the flame and fury of Heroes Of A Hundred Fields, instead, 10 songs bind together as a musing on confronting the fear that seems to cripple modern society. Echoes In The After stokes the sense of sonic revolt, adapting Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th century poem Since That to Death from The Countess Of Pembroke’s Arcadia into a lament for the callously felled tree up at Northumberland’s Sycamore Gap. A Hollow Existence mourns the disconnection of a world lost in online ephemera from the ancient rock and clay from which it was moulded.

Cannily sidestepping explicit politics, they lean doubly into imagery of their country’s old ways and wild places with which they have always been fascinated, seeing a land that was once untamed and unbowed, daring to dream whether that might ever be the case again.

Musically, it’s less a matter of reinventing the wheel than greasing the axle and binding it in fresh steel. Perdition’s Flame licks and bites with Luciferian intensity. The titanic title-track is as resolute in its frosty traditionalism as the title suggests. And although even gorgeously gentle acoustic interlude of Unspoken Elegy is a moment fans will anticipate at this point in Winterfylleth’s winding odyssey, rarely have they written with such captivating vulnerability.

Battling to the bitter end, there is no let up in atmosphere or impact. In Ashen Wake emerges slowly from haunting, weirdly Arthurian synths to establish itself as one of this band’s most unstoppable epics. Towards Elysium stacks up the riffs. Where Dreams Once Grew is another delicate instrumental. Then they sign off in imperious fashion with a stunning, unexpectedly faithful cover of Paradise Lost classic Enchantment. It’s a fitting final track from a band who’ve always conjured the dark magick of the past to guide their indomitable march.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Bathory, Emperor, Panopticon

The Unyielding Season is released on March 27 via Napalm