DRAUGVEIL & SELVNATT - Blades And Roses

Last year, the cover art of Draugveil's debut album ("Cruel World Of Dreams And Fear") went viral. In short, it was turned into a meme, deemed ridiculous by many purists still stuck in a fiercely orthodox mindset. In truth, this isn't really a case of blatant cross-pollination with other sounds, but rather a sui generis aesthetic approach, along the lines of what Këkht Aräkh (an artist who even ended up on Sacred Bones Records!) has recently done with his so-called romantic black metal. The latter is Ukrainian, just like young Yevhen Konovalov (Draugveil is now based in Prague) and Kyrylo Kyrylenko, the name behind the Selvnatt project instead.

The collaboration between the two — already sketched out in a track on the aforementioned album — becomes a fully-fledged album with "Blades & Roses", a work that's bound to get people talking, starting with a new cover that's obviously striking, for better or worse. Some will call them posers (adding that even the horse is, in some way, a blackster with its face painted), but it's important to focus on the music, because these two guys are actually far from contemptible.

"Shards" is a more than convincing calling card (the riff traces a melody as solemn as it is dramatic), a cutting track that's nonetheless able to conjure poignant, twilight-tinged feelings. This mood resurfaces often, especially when semi-acoustic shades become an integral part of the record (the excellent "Frozen Throne") or when melancholic breaks take full hold of the various compositions ("Unspoken"), even recalling Lifelover.

If "Gjennom Liv Og Død" sounds like a (not entirely successful) tribute to early-2000s Darkthrone, it must be said that the more relaxed interludes only work up to a point too ("Vestige" and "Wilted Bloom" fail to leave a mark), unlike the closing "Afterlife", a fine depressive gut-punch that (unsurprisingly) brings to mind those atmospheres so dear to Këkht Aräkh on the single "Dröm Såvng". The lo-fi production brings things full circle, because romanticism is all well and good, but it's always better when it blooms like a rose on the filthiest of battlefields.

Detractors aside, "Blades & Roses" is therefore a solid and noteworthy collaboration, the result of the intentions of two young men (Yevhen was born in 2002) who are in some ways still green and naive, but undoubtedly capable of communicating something interesting within a scene that also needs diversions like this.

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18/02/2026