Naglfar - Diabolical (1998)

Back in the 90’s damn near every band coming out of Sweden, which carried a black or death metal tag was way above average and absolutely enormous in sound, musicianship and atmosphere. One such band that sticks out the most for me is Umeå based band Naglfar, which released a sheer slaughter of raging black/death metal in 1998 called, ‘Diabolical.’

On Diabolical, Naglfar rips through forty four minutes of furious melodic black metal with death influences and an enormously darkened atmosphere unlike few else out there. With a loud, vibrant and nearly perfect production job, Andreas Nilsson and Mad Morgan Hansson’s guitar work is captured beautifully and devastatingly assault’s the ears with their sheer speed, melodic touches and technical ability. Kristoffer Olivius’ heavy bass attack is also clearly audible and completely kills in the song, ‘When Autumn Storms Come’ and Mattias Grahn’s rampant brutal drumming is like the infernal legions of hell all coming at you at once. There’s also some inclusion of acoustic guitars and magnificent backing synth passages on this album, but, of course, one of the best aspects of the early Naglfar records is the lead vocals of Jens Ryden. There’s few (if any) that come close to sounding as malevolent and lethal as Jens did on those first two Naglfar records and I’m quite sure once you hear his hellish screams you’ll agree that he was indeed one of the best in the 90’s.

With this album Naglfar created what I believe to be one of the most pissed off, flesh peeling, bone breaking recordings of sonic black metal torment ever conceived. From the opening cut, ‘Horncrowned Majesty’ to ‘When Autumn Storms Come’ this record is absolutely on fire, but then takes a quick break for, ‘A Departure in Solitude,’ which is an ambient/symphonic piece, but then comes back just as vicious with the final song, ‘Diabolical – The Devil’s Child.’

This is one of those records you put on when the world fucks you over and hard, it’s a record to play when you need to wake yourself up, it’s just an ideal, absolutely priceless brutally melodic black metal recording. Put your hands in the air and bang your head for Satan! I fucking love this album!

After this album Naglfar took another five years before unleashing their third album, ‘Sheol,’ which was very similar but failed to capture the same amount of anger and violent brutality that Diabolical had, and unfortunately everything they’ve done after Sheol was damn near worthless, mostly because of the drastic line-up changes. Fortunately I caught Naglfar live back in 2003 when they were still cranking out some of the best black metal these ears have ever heard. Furthermore, all I can really say is if you’ve ignored Naglfar or this album then definitely add this classic to your list of albums to get.