Bergen-based melodic black metal outfit Sworn release their fifth album, Null Crowned the Infinite. It follows 2023’s A Journey told through Fire.

SWORN

There is something strangely familiar in Null Crowned the Infinite, even though Sworn are looking far beyond the usual landscapes of black metal. Their fifth album is a six-track concept album about the life and death of the cosmos, beginning with the first spark in the void, moving through existence and entropy, and eventually returning to nothingness. Or perhaps not quite returning, because the cycle may simply begin again.

The cover by Pär Olofsson immediately gives you the scale of what is coming. His artwork for bands such as Aborted and Kreator has already become part of the visual language of extreme metal, and here everything is stretched into something enormous, almost impossible to contain. It is the universe from its first breath to its final collapse.

Cosmic black metal is obviously the first thing that comes to mind. Darkspace were among the bands that pushed black metal into this direction, taking it away from the old forests and ruins and throwing it into a much more frightening emptiness. But Sworn don’t sound like a band trying to recreate that formula. In fact, some of the most interesting things on this album happen because they move in completely different directions.

MELODIC DARKNESS

There is a lot of classic heavy metal here. Power metal too. And some of the guitar work made me think of Stratovarius’ Destiny, especially those open, airy passages and the neoclassical scales. It is a strange combination when you look at the subject matter, but it works. The guitars need that sense of space. Sometimes they feel like they are disappearing into the distance, and then they come back with something much sharper and heavier.

Null Crowned the Infinite has a much more classic Nordic black metal character. The coldness is there, the melodic darkness, that familiar feeling of being somewhere completely removed from the everyday world. And then the guitar solo arrives and completely steals the scene. It is magnificent, and it is also one of those moments that reminds you that Sworn are not interested in keeping the album inside one particular black-metal box.

TOUCHING THE SUN

The lyrics are where another connection started bothering me in the best possible way.

Reading them, I kept thinking about Sacramentum’s Far Away from the Sun. Not because Sworn sound like Sacramentum, because they don’t, but because some of the words and images feel strangely connected. Night, silence, darkness, stars, coldness, eternity, chaos, the void, journeys into unknown dimensions. The language is different in places, but the feeling behind it is familiar.

Sacramentum’s traveller moves through sleep and dreams, leaving the ordinary world behind, passing through darkness and frozen forests until reaching the castle of the self. Sworn take almost the same kind of journey and remove the landscape completely. There is no forest, no castle, nothing solid to hold onto. There is only the universe.

And there is one line of thought I really love here: Sacramentum goes far away from the sun, while Sworn touches the sun. That is almost the whole difference between the two worlds. One moves away from the light towards a private, mystical darkness. The other moves directly towards the centre of the cosmic unknown. 

A COSMIC STORM

In A Cosmic Storm, everything is already moving. Dark matter, the limits of existence, a nameless star, a dying sphere left behind. There is a voyage taking place, but there is nowhere familiar to arrive at.

The lyrics of Fracture of Aeons push this even further, and this is easily the outstanding track. That riff is particularly impressive. It has that immediate pull that makes you want to go back to the track before the album has even finished. Then the guitars open up into those gorgeous neoclassical passages, and suddenly the whole thing feels much larger than a black-metal song. The lyrics begin right at the beginning of everything: nothingness, a spark of life, reality taking form, time breaking into shards. Then the voyage begins from a starless shore. Stars align, a pathway opens, and the search goes towards the “utter cosmos”. Later, everything becomes more abstract limbo, a hollow odyssey, the void, the unknown. And then comes the disappearance of the individual. Faceless. Voiceless. Nameless.

This is one of the things I find most interesting about the album. The old black metal journey often had someone entering another world and finding something there, a castle, a landscape, a forgotten dimension, some strange place belonging only to them. Here, the further the journey goes, the less there is left of the person making it. Eventually there is nothing to be found because there is nothing left to find. Only the void.

CREATION & DESTRUCTION

That is why the old 90s black-metal imagery keeps coming back to mind. The vocabulary hasn’t completely disappeared. It has simply been pushed somewhere else. The frozen forests have become stars. The mystical dimension has become the cosmos. The journey is no longer through an imagined landscape but through time, matter, creation and destruction.

And musically Sworn keep changing the scale of it. The black-metal passages give the album its coldness, but the heavy-metal and power-metal elements bring melody and movement, while those neoclassical guitars give some of the songs an almost weightless quality. It is not what I expected from an album whose titles scream cosmic black metal, and that is probably one of the reasons it works so well for me.

Null Crowned the Infinite is not simply about space, it is about what happens when there is no space yet. Before life. Before thought. Before form. And eventually, after everything has fallen apart. The universe is born from nothing, travels through everything, and disappears back into the same darkness.

Sworn: Website

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