The new album from Ormskrik is the best possible kind of surprise – a dark thrash masterpiece we are going to listen to for years to come.

Ormskrik is a young band from Norway. The band is: Gjøran Bårdsen (vocals), Anders Skjæveland and Tormod Hansen (guitars), Erik Bakke (bass), and Kristoffer Fikstvedt (drums). Thrash is where I would put them if I had to pick a one-word description, but the black metal tradition in strong here too. If we try to analyze the alchemy, we might say the music begins in a black metal field that is infused with thrash then hastened with modernity and a saturating conjuror’s imagery. You almost never come across a new band that can survive a comparison to Slayer, but Ormskrik does. The music has that kind of speed and adds a black metal tone and a death metal tinge in the vocals. It is a mystical amalgam.

When I first listened to this album, I conceptualized it in three parts – two opening songs, an interlude, three middle songs, another interlude, and then the closing four songs. I am on board with the entire set, but it is the last part that really implanted itself in my mind. The troika of “Helheim,” “The Morbid Arrives,” and “Hecatomb” simply lays waste to your musical consciousness and the final track, “”Eye For An Eye,” verily finishes you off. The pulsing rhythm hooks and myriad merging confluences are propelling forces you cannot shake off. When the closer turns reflective halfway through, it is not what we expected, but it lands just right, as does the acoustic outro creating, as it does, a sort of final fugue (second voice). I am going to wrap this up now so I can go down to the lake, sit by myself, and get all clinical in my head about this album because I think there is a lot going on here. You don’t have to do a deep dive into your psyche to get into these songs, but you’ll know when you hear this album that it is something different, it is something special.

Orsmkrik is available now from Fysisk Format for a vinyl edition and Bandcamp for the digital. Get ahead of the curve and listen now. Highly recommended.

Band photo by Martine Cecilie Berger.

Links.

https://ormskrik.bandcamp.com/album/ormskrik

https://www.facebook.com/ormskrikband

https://www.facebook.com/fysiskformat https://www.fysiskformat.no