Ritualmord – This is not Lifelover
Band: Ritualmord
Album: This is not Lifelover
Label: Unjoy – Art and Ritualia
Release date: March 8th, 2025
Country: Sweden
Format reviewed: High-quality digital recording
Ritualmord is the vessel of 1853 and (), both creative forces behind Lifelover during the active years of the now cult declared depressive black metal/rock band. My first attempt to listen to their new manifestation lasts only a couple of minutes. The haunted voice of () opens a floodgate to memories from a time I would rather not revisit, when the rapid shifts between pain and laughter of Lifelover albums Pulver and Konkurs carried me through my days. I can’t take it. Not today.
Maybe I am not the right person to review the first full length of Ritualmord. I am too involved, my associations too personal. Then I consider the title and cover. Maybe I am just the right person. I choose a better day and press play for the second time. I am glad I did. It soon becomes evident that This is not Lifelover. It is so much worse.
The music starts as a soft soundscape, like a water colour painting. Despite the electronic influence and use of drone backgrounds, the sound wall has texture and depth. It feels organic, rather like acoustic recordings having been stretched out, bent and shaped into pastel skies, thin clouds drawn out with a watered brush. There is a lightness to it, yet it feels… suffocating. Oppressive. As if the airy brush strokes promise a resolution that never comes, yet the glimmers of beauty and strands of hope keep me locked in anticipation. When distorted guitars take over after ten minutes it is a relief. Something firm to hold on to. I hear echoes of early works of Hypothermia such as En mil i motvind and Skogens hjärta.
The soundscape ebbs and flows in slow waves of distortion and drums followed by almost ambient electronic passages. With it ebbs and flows the voices and the poetry. () lets his voice progress from spoken words trembling with repressed feeling into haunted screams and ghastly wails, 1853 responding as distant echo.
The slow increase in intensity and the effect of () in the beginning of a song telling the poetry like plain statements of truth, then repeating it with an increasingly tortured voice until throwing the words through the soundscape in agonized screams, has a devastating effect. I can’t defend myself. I see the words written in white letters behind my eyes. I feel them behind my ribs. Then the song ends without ending and a new one begins, new slow soundscape, new words spoken with trembling constraint. Over and over. There is no closure and no relief.
The Swedish lyrics are clearly audible. The lyrical style is direct and simple with the kitchen zink realism I recognize from Lifelover, but without surprising turns or comic relief. Unbound by convention but with traces of stacked rhymes and compelling rhythm some lines resemble pieces of rap songs. Other lines in irregular meters, with made up words and sudden shifts between almost romantic beauty, realism and despair resemble works by modern Swedish poets like Kristina Lugn and Göran Palm.
When I let myself get drawn into the oppressive atmosphere I realise, with Lifelover I could always keep my distance. Even if their work deeply affected me, I never lost my own footing. The pain was sprinkled with distractions, interruptions that gave plenty of room to return to my own reality. The wild variation in musical influences, rhythm and style, the many quotes and samples ranging from brilliant to goofy. The hit and miss effect of multiple experimental vocal styles. It all brought elements of distance between me and the music.
Ritualmord has nothing of this. Not one moment of relief. Not one stumble. The whole production is crushingly cohesive. The hypnotic flow is constant. Lighter chords and warmer harmonies just increase the pain, like moments of kindness appearing only to remind us we have something to lose. Every word and every scream fit in seamlessly. () has honed and perfected his emotional vocal style into an instrument of haunting despair and repressed agony. The echo of 1853 become a vicious circle of intrusive thought in an isolated mind. Not even the most desperate shrieks or panicked breathing feel theatrical.
I could have lived without the few samples, and I would have preferred more of the guitars and less of the pastel soundscape, but these imperfections don’t break the spell. The world of Ritualmord is suffocating. It offers no redemption and no escape. It all comes together as a work of art, even the cover, an obvious paraphrase of the cover of Pulver, where a naked girl covered in blood was posing in the same environment.
Yes. The cover. Had I seen the naked girl in the field of flowers before I listened to Pulver I would never have given the music a chance because, let’s be honest, how many time has the trope of the anonymous naked girl displayed for attention been exploited all through history… But my first encounter with Lifelover was a live recording of “Mitt öppna öga”. The raw honesty and surprising humour of the performance sealed my fate and here I am, almost two decades later, looking at a cover almost exactly the same, but with the artist himself exposed in the field of white flowers. And so my own reactions become part of the poetry. My past irritation, my interpretation and re-interpretation, confusion and hope. Can this be called progress? Growth?
In the press release Ritualmord claims to be firmly rooted in Black Metal, not as a genre but as a lifestyle. As I get lost in their world, I begin to understand what they mean. With the history of Lifelover, the lives of the artists to some degree laid open, wounds and blood displayed, pills and hospitalisations; and with this new creation, the surviving children of Lifelover continuing their journey, the blades and drugs present in the lyrics, left to the audience to interpret as metaphorical or autobiographical truth. The artists become the art and with that the lives of the audience, the memories, reactions and associations, become part of the art as well. In “Se mig” () urges and pleads for the listener to look him in the eyes and I think of the performance artist Marina Abramovic. The passing of time, changes of life circumstances, relationships and maturity, lived reality being transformed into art and the art performed as lived reality. The body as object and subject, touched and modified, the lusting or fearful or critical gazes and the eyes of the beheld looking back. The experimentation with the physical and emotional self at stake for the relentless search of something more sacred than survival. In this sense there is a clear line from Dead to Lifelover to () posing naked and covered in blood in the same field of wood anemones where he almost two decades earlier poured blood over an anonymous female model.
With each repetition the listening experience evolves. On the third day I start to feel addicted. My initial resistance is gone, and I find myself longing to go back to the strangely bent and drawn soundscape, the tortured voices, the words frustrating and painful like dull razor blades. Why? Is this dense emptiness my own or has the oppressive atmosphere infected my mind? There is nothing cool to be found in this condition, yet I go back, press repeat, as if the journey is unfinished, open ended, repeating in my mind, turning the physical experience of the real sound into a relief.
As I come to the end of my review I understand the title as a warning. Don’t press play in a sensitive state. Don’t expect to be entertained. Don’t expect relief, comfort or distraction. This is not Lifelover. 9/10 by Ask
9/10 Epic Storm
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