Helrunar - Vanitas Vanitatvm [Digipak]

2018 release. Founded in 2001, German black metal instigators Helrunar have gone from strength to strength, establishing themselves as a band approaching Nordic themes with brains. Records such as Frostnacht and Baldr Ok Iss are regarded as seminal works for the country's scene before the group shook off genre conventions altogether in favor of a holistic approach to extreme music and it's topics. This is manifest in 2011's double album Sól. While their sixth full-length Niederkunfft (2015) marked the beginning of a new era with recourse to archaic death and doom metal pondering late medieval superstition in the face of the Enlightenment, successor Vanitas Vanitatum shows yet another tack, albeit within a similar stylistic framework. Musically, front man M.D., who forms one half of the group besides drummer S.K., places Vanitas Vanitatum between it's predecessor and the Sól era. "The songs are more compact and mature, also mostly faster, and again, more black metal. Apart from that, there have been influences you might call nostalgic." With it's title referring to a famous ode by 17th century poet Andreas Gryphius, Helrunar's seventh puts the well-known saying (meaning "vanity of vanities" or "all is vain") into a contemporary context, resulting in "our most cynical and misanthropic work to date in a consciously exaggerated way," says M.D. "We address different forms of vanity and narcissism, which are rampant in our age, to reveal their psychological and societal origins and consequences. Both traits are contrasted by death and corruption to show their inanity."