Vredensdal was dead.
Or so we were told.
After an impressive run of four full-length albums and a couple of EPs between 2019 and 2023, culminating in the blight-rupturing record Sonic Devotion to Darkness, primary songwriter the Goblin Reaper himself called it quits. He still wrote and recorded music, of course, but he recognized that his relationship to that music was changing, and he was unwilling to chain new ideas to an old identity.
It seemed like Vredensdal might be relegated to the rear view. A new project, Cranial Vortex, dropped its prog-death neutron bomb Infinite Interactions in the waning days of 2024, but still something stirred beneath the Goblin’s cold-eyed mask. More Vredensdal music had been recorded in 2023 but languished, unreleased, until Goblin Reaper returned to it with fresh ears and revitalized intent. In October, the full record, called Mystery & Power, will blaze a path to Vredensdal’s audience, and Decibel gets to share that album’s second track with you today.
Goblin Reaper shared these insights on his band’s hiatus and return:
“My previous experience with my last album opened my eyes to the business side of an industry I had thought was built on passion for the music. Over the years, I began to feel that black metal had become complacent and stagnant, with so many artists essentially copying and pasting the rules of the genre into their music for acceptance rather than creating something truly unique for the sake of the sound.
“In many ways, this album represents what ‘broke’ Vredensdal – the point where the project began to fracture and descend because of the evolution of an ideology clashing with a tradition steeped in gatekeeping. This song touches on that directly, eschewing the comforts of simpleminded conformity for an authentic embrace of the blade’s edge known as creativity.”
Make sure to check out the Vredensdal Bandcamp page to pre-order Mystery & Power and catch up on any of the Vredensdal history you might have missed up to this point!
