Pacific Northwest black metal outfit Hulder returns with Verbolgen, a third full-length that trades solitary vision for shared command – nine tracks of frostbitten, folk-threaded black metal that rages, mourns and marches in equal measure.

HULDER

Some projects guard their singular vision like a secret. Hulder – the black metal creation of a Belgian-born, Pacific Northwest–based multi-instrumentalist who shares the project’s name – has spent three albums slowly loosening that grip, and on Verbolgen the door swings fully open. This is the first Hulder record to formally elevate long-serving collaborator Necreon from session player to equal partner. What was once a one-woman act is now, unmistakably, a duo – and the song writing has grown to match.

Verbolgen is Hulder’s most complete and self-assured statement yet. Its foundations are set deep in old-school Scandinavian black metal, but its reach stretches somewhere older and stranger – toward ancestral memory, natural sovereignty, and pre-Christian ritual, with words delivered across English, Flemish, and Proto-Germanic. Hurdy-gurdy, acoustic textures and session flute curl through the mix like woodsmoke, and yet none of it blunts the bite. Here, ferocity and atmosphere move together rather than trading blows.

AN INVOCATION

The album opens with Drie Raven, an instrumental prelude that behaves less like a throwaway intro and more like an invocation. Where so many black metal preludes are dead weight, this one earns its keep – a hushed, folk-tinged overture that feels like a gathering around a low fire before the tale properly begins. Consider it the indrawn breath before everything erupts.

The Crowning and Thy Binding Oath form the opening statement proper, and they lay both bands’ cards on the table at once. Lilting, faintly medieval melodies wind through them, carrying an almost playful lift, yet the riffing beneath stays gnarled and cold, and Marliese’s rasp presides over all of it. The old-world colour is everywhere, but it never once curdles into costume-drama pastiche.

Then the record bares its teeth. The title track is the shortest, sharpest thing here – barely four minutes of blast-driven fury that lives up to its name, verbolgen being a Flemish word for enraged or incensed. Straight after it, …And We Shall Sing keeps the pressure pinned to the floor, all thunderous percussion and merciless tremolo, before a faint chant surfaces near the close like a voice carried over a wall of guitar. Back-to-back, this pair is the album’s most savage stretch, and among its very finest.

LITURGICAL WEIGHT

At the record’s centre sits In Blood and In Earth, its longest piece at just over seven minutes and, to my ears, its most quietly commanding. It opens into a still, spacious hush before settling into something slower and more deliberate, Keld’s keys lending the passage a processional, almost liturgical weight. This is a band content to let atmosphere carry the load – unhurried, and entirely sure of itself.

If Verbolgen has a beating heart, it is Den Nacht Zijn Lied – “the night’s song.” Here is classic black metal delivered with modern precision: relentless drumming, a low end you feel in the sternum, and melodies that grieve even as the tempo attacks. Marliese’s saw-toothed rasp trades off against Necreon’s deeper growls to genuinely thrilling effect, and the track shifts between scorching and hypnotic across seven minutes without wasting a bar. It might just be the strongest thing here.

View From Nemeton tears past like a gale – named for the sacred druidic grove and duly wrapped in ritual language and cold fury. Marliese half-recites its incantatory lines as though reading a rite aloud, harsh, clean voices circling one another while the band hurtles along behind. It is the last real assault before the album steps away to catch its breath.

THE GLOW OF DAWN

The Glow of Dawn closes proceedings on an expansive instrumental high. After so much severity, the release feels earned – a slow climb toward light that leaves you faintly unmoored, blinking, unsure where the last three-quarters of an hour disappeared to. As closers go, it is beautifully judged.

Craft is the word that keeps returning. Recorded at Elektric City Recording in Portland and mixed by Ahti Kortelainen at Finland’s Tico Tico Studios before Mika Jussila’s master, Verbolgen sounds both raw and rich – cold to the touch yet full-bodied, never once swapping grit for gloss. Keld’s hurdy gurdy and keys, Ianuaria’s session flute, and the drumming split between Vapula and Vrolok all find room to breathe without anyone getting buried, blast beats and folk instruments sharing the same air.

The change is visual as much as sonic. The old corpse paint has been set aside in favour of an emblem drawn from the natural world, and the sleeve – dawn breaking over a stand of leafless trees – tells you plenty about where Hulder’s head is at these days. This is a project increasingly rooted in soil and season rather than pure darkness; the frost is still here, but now so is the light that comes after it.

GROWING ASSURANCE

Set beside 2021’s debut Godslastering: Hymns of a Forlorn Peasantry and 2024’s Verses in Oath, the trajectory could not be clearer. Each Hulder record has arrived more layered and more assured than the last, and Verbolgen is the clearest realisation of that arc to date. Necreon’s formal promotion has not diluted the identity Marliese built – if anything, it has sharpened it.

Verbolgen is grim, majestic and, beneath all the frost, unmistakably melancholic. It pays its dues to the second-wave forebears without ever sheltering behind them, and it plants Hulder firmly among the most compelling names in black metal right now. For the devoted, it is a conquering statement; for the curious, it is as fine an entry point as you will find. Three albums in, Hulder no longer sounds like a promising underground secret; it sounds like a band that knows exactly what it is and precisely where it intends to go. Answer the call.

Verbolgen: Bandcamp

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