WARMOON LORD - Sacrosanct Demonopathy Black Vinyl

Once the best-kept secret of the ever-fertile Finnish black metal underground, WARMOON LORD truly made their presence known with 2021's Battlespells. Released by WEREWOLF, the band's second album fulfilled the promise of 2019's not-inconsiderable Burning Banners of the Funereal War with superlative flair. The sound was stridently classicist, but suffused with windswept grandeur, martial surge, and orkish execution - and, perhaps above all, both songwriting and personality to spare. No longer "the other project of the OLD SORCERY guy," WARMOON LORD mainman Lord Vrajitor made sure Battlespells lived up to its namesake, and then some.

The stage thus set, WARMOON LORD make lateral developments with all-important third album Sacrosanct Demonopathy. On the surface, the foundation is largely the same - pure & proud black metal of a most fantastical nature, even "medieval," but always burning with that icy-hot passion that so fired the second wave during the mythical 1990s - but there's a wider canvas of textures and emotions at play here. The songwriting fires on literally all cylinders - truly, variety is not a dirty word in this context - with each of these eight tracks (QUICKLY) moving in myriad directions, but ones that are increasingly complex and even cathartic; it's not difficult to imagine castle spires continually ascending, so cresting and climactic are Sacrosanct Demonopathy's component songs. What's more, the crisp & effervescent recording heightens the nightsky melodicism to a point where it almost feels paradoxically "bright" - but with stained-glass synths winding in and out of those spires, the darkness widens again and devours the listener in a purple haze. Not surprisingly, then, the central themes to the album are more personal and turned inwards - Satanic fantasy, occultism, destroying ties with the herd, and crucially "creating your own worlds," in Lord Vrajitor's own words - compared to its predecessor's ones of pride, conquering, war, tyranny, and ruling. Wide awake and dreaming is WARMOON LORD here!

The trailblazers (or, rather, church-burners) of the '90s eventually went slicker, more "mature" directions as that decade drew to a close. A few were more successful than most, and if such is a foregone conclusion if one writes & performs pure black metal, then WARMOON LORD honorably uphold the exception to the rule with the epic landscape of Sacrosanct Demonopathy!