Nokturnal Mortum
Verity

Bandcamp, number one in the general charts, the official online store overwhelmed with requests before the album's release, limited boxes already sold out the day after the official sale date in stores worldwide. Who are we talking about? A Pop group? Pop-Rock? A dance hit from the past summer? Famous local rockers? No, it's Nokturnal Mortum, a predominantly Black Metal group (although this definition has always been quite reductive) from Ukraine, long opposed due to the usual political connotation (framed in the oft-cited NSBM genre).

For a few months, I had wanted to try writing about this veteran group of extreme music (active since 1996), but frankly, I did not know how to approach it given the sheer caliber of these incredible musicians! The soul of this endeavor is the eternal Eugeny “Varggoth” Gapon. I don't want to add anything; you can find their history online if you wish, as well as the spiteful rumors, and the visceral hatred of their (political) opponents. Their official website is comprehensive and detailed. If you have never heard them artistically, then you have missed out on great emotions, gems like Lunar Poetry, Goat Horns and the immense Weltanschauung and The Voice of Steel, to name those I love madly, are, in their own way, all true and absolute masterpieces. I genuinely believe there's something sinister and unmentionable behind their unnatural way of not missing a beat. Let's take this Verity; the tracks average between five and eight minutes, and for the entire duration of these sonic rides, there's not half a minute where one gets bored. On the contrary, the excitement rises piece by piece because nothing remains the same; everything changes and evolves, writhes like in the Dantean metamorphoses that punished the damned of the seventh circle. The voice changes and transforms, becoming ever more "clean" and epic, the music changes and morphs, the musicianship and mastery of these damned enchanters are here; it is all to be heard. Everything is perfect, majestic, everything is there, as in the already mentioned two previous albums in my opinion, only that in this Verity everything continues to grow, surprising anyone who dedicates themselves to it. You will find angry screams and reassuring modulations, folk tones and classic "Pagan Metal" timbres, as well as hyper-fast tirades, tempo changes, choral inserts, howls, war horns, whispers, a cello, and much more. My friends, we're talking about an hour and a quarter of pure emotion, certainly a work of this kind is not easy to understand; it needs to be listened to again and reopened, like one of those books that you might love even from the start, but that, with re-readings and other fleeting glances, become "historic," immortal. As already written by other more prominent reviewers, it is impossible to speak of the individual pieces, and it would not do justice to the work in question; the opus unfolds in one great ritual, it must be heard. This pseudo review should have been in very few words, something like: "not much to say in such cases, it is only to be listened to," as my Italian teacher used to say in the first year of high school about text analysis, namely: "before analyzing any text, one thing is necessary: read it," it seems trivial and obvious, but upon reflection, it is not. However, I thought it only right to provide a bit of context to it all, which is why I allowed myself to extend it.

In conclusion, I add that, despite the NM having been and continuing to be essentially boycotted on certain sites and platforms, they remain a classic example of how, when there's true Art, with the deserved capital A, behind statements (however crazy and out of place they may be), every wall falls and every barbed wire rusts and crumbles with it. The only reality is that Verity is a spectacular album. That's all there is to it.