Blut Aus Nord has descended so deeply into its own mythology that keeping count has become irrelevant, yet let us say this anyway: with Ethereal Horizons the band enters yet another incarnation in a career that mutates faster than a laboratory virus in a poorly ventilated basement. After all the previous winding paths — from clinical blasphemy to sacred space-shivering — there was a certain tension surrounding this new chapter. The question was not what Vindsval would do, but how far he would step off the map this time.
The answer is an album that seems to have been written in a place where oxygen is little more than a rumor. From the first gusts of Shadows Breathe First emerges a mass of sound that does not seek to impress but refuses to become comprehensible. The guitars move like liquid structures, not toward a goal but toward a condition. Riff patterns seem to pulse according to a logic that announces itself only to immediately implode again, while the rhythms behave like unstable gravitational events. You don’t hear a build-up: you undergo a shift.
In the midst of all that, Seclusion surfaces — a moment in which the record reveals a rare form of extraterrestrial self-awareness. The underlying absurdity is never spoken aloud, but it is tangible, a kind of cosmic smirk in which all dissonance suddenly acquires a theatrical flair. The music behaves not like a narrator, but like an entity reluctantly admitting that even the infinite enjoys cracking a joke from time to time. Not to be funny, but to make the seriousness of the rest of the universe falter for a moment.
The melancholic undercurrent expands further in the zones related to The Ordeal. Here everything slows down. Here the record unfolds a kind of patience that is both comforting and unsettling. A floating, almost timid sadness that comes to light when the dissonance stops colliding for a moment. The sounds do not seem played, but exhaled. A deeper resonance emerges, in which the music pauses within its own echo yet continues to drift forward.
And then there is that moment when the whole thing bursts open again: the energy of The Fall Opens The Sky in all its timeless capriciousness, with a riff philosophy reminiscent of the 777 series. Here there is no structure, but a compulsion. Rhythmic fragmentation, melodic shards, sound that collapses in on itself only to reorganize instantly into a form with just enough coherence not to dissipate entirely. It feels less like chaos and more like a force field that refuses to consider human expectations — a form of freedom that is both unsettling and fascinating.
What sets Ethereal Horizons apart is the way it constantly balances between exaltation and an undeniable awareness of its own absurdity. The music is grand, sometimes excessively so, but never empty. It moves in a vacuum where solemnity and self-irony take turns giving each other space. Here Blut Aus Nord sounds like a priest who, halfway through the mass, realizes the cosmos may have no gods — yet the ritual remains unbearably beautiful, especially when What Burns Now Listens and Twin Suns Reverie steer the album between vulnerability and surreal clarity.
At this stage of their existence, Blut Aus Nord is not concerned with evolution, let alone expectations. Ethereal Horizons feels like a new outgrowth of the same organism, a metastasis of imagination that refuses to be fixed within genres or movements. The album shifts, glides, crumbles, and repairs itself without apology. The End Becomes Grace closes the record like a horizon that moves the moment you approach it — a phenomenon that asks not for explanation but for attention. Much like the writer of this piece
Score:
95/100
Label:
Debemur Morti, 2025
Tracklisting:
- . Shadows Breathe First
- Seclusion
- The Ordeal
- The Fall Opens The Sky
- What Burns Now Listens
- Twin Suns Reverie
- The End Becomes Grace
Line-up:
- Vindsval – Vocals, guitar
- ghÖst -Bass guitar
- W.D. Feld – Drums, electronics, keyboard
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