ALBUM REVIEW: The Wheel – Slaegt

In a musical landscape where artists turn into alchemists and pioneer unknown sonic territories, the concept of genre is somewhat benign. DEAFHEAVEN have thrown the conventions of black metal to the wind as leaders of the blackgaze movement with their lo-fi shoegaze approach, whilst one-man bedroom project ZEAL & ARDOR has crafted a spiritually charged weapon of destruction with their blackened gospel. Following in their peers footsteps, Denmark’s SLAEGT combine raw 90’s black metal with the true spirit of the late 70s/early 80s NWOBHM scene to create an utterly bewildering and nightmarishly thrilling world of intoxicating riffs and blistering blast beats draped across a lyrically magical landscape.

Having started out as a traditional black metal outfit, SLAEGT have progressively entangled their black metal in a web of heavy metal, throwing out riffs that wouldn’t be out of place on an IRON MAIDEN or JUDAS PRIEST outing. So much so that on album number three, The Wheel, they weave the threads of both genres so meticulously you’ll often be left wondering whether you’re listening to IRON MAIDEN if they were fronted by VENOM’s Cronos.

V.W.A. is traditional black metal in all its glory, blast beats bludgeoning the senses like a battering ram before delving into a progressive trance-like state where jangling guitars glimmer and glow somewhat hauntingly. Citrinitas meanwhile rips open the pit with a riff so infectiously dizzying it could easily pass as a number on JUDAS PRIEST’s recent effort Firepower. All the while vocalist Asrok delivers a blood-curdling performance throughout the album, howling and growling his way through a thematical territory of magic, life, and death.

Building on 2017’s Domus Mysterium, SLAEGT continue to mix business with pleasure, fantastical worlds with poignant realism. Whilst the lyrical content on The Wheel as a whole is otherworldly and magical, it is also shrouded in a sense of suffocating isolation, of a narrator trapped in his own story fumbling for the right words to express his feelings. Gauntlet Of Lovers surmises this album-long statement with a sense of poetic beauty: “A gauntlet of lovers was shaped by my deeds, defined by my memories, abused by my needs.” Somewhere here there’s a statement of intent, a cry for help, a depth to SLAEGT’s lyricism that’s been lacking across their previous material.

Whether they’re trying to replicate the recording quality of the golden eras of the genres they’re melding together or they’re simply undercutting themselves, the raw production could do with refining. Whilst it certainly adds to the black-meets-heavy metal aesthetic, it also takes away from the sheer quality of musicianship at work here, pulling them back ever so gently from reaching the potential they so deserve to unlock.

Dropping an album that bends the rules, breaks the barriers, and blurs the lines between genres in a year that’s had album of the year contenders from alchemists like DEAFHEAVEN and ZEAL & ARDOR, you’d be forgiven for assuming it’d fall in line. However, in The Wheel, SLAEGT have crafted themselves a masterwork.

Rating: 9/10

The Wheel is out now via Ván Records.

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