Often the beauty and power of extreme metal comes from its dichotomies. The contrast between radiant melodies and crushing riffs, clean and harsh vocals, synths and blast beats — in essence, the light and the dark. Demonstrating all of this — and driven itself by the disparity between immense atmosphere and one of the most intense drum performances I’ve ever heard on a black metal album — Swedish/American act Ringarë are ending 2023 on a very high note with Of Momentous Endless Night. Don’t finalize your album of the year list just yet.

Ringarë is one of the many projects of Alex “Esoterica” Poole (Chaos Moon, Skáphe, Krieg), so right off the bat you should be expecting black metal of a high pedigree. The sonic qualities on Of Momentous Endless Night are that of highly atmospheric black metal led not just by guitar leads, but lush symphonic keyboards accentuated by bright piano that often provides the melodic component. Opener “Usurping Dark Magicks” takes little time in introducing all these aspects with its mix of atmospheric melodies and more furious black metal. As bitingly cold as the music often is — enhanced greatly by the venomous shrieks of vocalist Likpredikaren — the synths in particular have a eerie warmness to them, aided chiefly by the production being quite good for a black metal album of this style (especially when compared to Ringarë’s earlier material). The secret ingredient that shoots this album from good to great, however, is the performance of session drummer Jack Blackburn.

In all my years of listening to metal there’s only two other times I can recall where it was the drumming on a single song that caught my ear and made me fall in love with an album: the first listens of “Goat Skull Crown” by Obliteration and “The Echoes of a Disharmonic Evensong” by Panopticon. I think I can now add “Of Mages and Mystics” to this list. Blackburn has been featured on a number of Poole’s other projects including Gardsghastr (as well as the aforementioned Skáphe and Chaos Moon), but this is regrettably the first time I’ve taken notice of his playing. Earlier work includes Enfold Darkness and Inferi, and the tech death background absolutely shows on Of Momentous Endless Night. Quick bursts of ultra-fast kick drum, constant fills, dancing around a basic 4/4 rhythm with ease; the drumming adds an extra layer of both propulsion and anxiety, no doubt elevating the rest of music to a higher level in terms of both intensity and technicality. It also serves to make the occasional guitar-only breaks (such as in closer “Blood Pact Vindication”) stand out amongst the glorious cacophony even more.

Just as the drums dance around and through a flurry of rhythms and tempos so too do the guitar and piano, resulting in a sonic palette that’s just as beautiful as it is intense. The disparity between the drum performance and the rest of the instrumentation might be over the top on any number of other albums, but there’s some dark magick at play here that makes it truly work. It may be arriving too late in the year to make my AOTY list, but that’s irrelevant to what’s actually on Of Momentous Endless Night. Ringarë have created something truly special.

— Colin

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Of Momentous Endless Night will be available December 15 on Avantgarde Music. For for information on Ringarë, check out their Bandcamp page.