Album Review: Fyrgast – Mistress of Darkness
Band: Fyrgast
Title: Mistress of Darkness
Label: War Productions
Release date: May 2nd, 2025
Country: Sweden
Format reviewed: High-Quality Digital Recording
Album Review: Fyrgast – Mistress of Darkness via War Productions by Sílvia
I like Black Metal, specially the Scandinavian sound, because musicians from up North know as no others how to infuse an insane amount of cold and rawness to their music. And Fyrgast, a one man band from Sweden, knows a lot about it.
“Mistress of Darkness” is the new offering by Vidar Wetterhall, the man who does everything in this 35 minute descent into the depths of the most dark emotions. Through sharp and repetitive riffs, intense emotions emerge, like uncontrollable ocean waves. And everything flows, and everything is dragged by the icy guitar harmonies.
Starting with “Plagues of the Night”, you have already a taste of that brutal cold: guitars play repetitive riffs, drums play varied tempos (from intense bass pedal stepping, to mid-tempo passages including tom rolls that fills perfectly), and Vidar ripping out slices from his throat with those tormented screams. There’s no variation in the voice but it sounds brutal.
At times I have the impression that I’m trapped in a monotonous loop, but this is what makes this album so good: the ability to captivate the listener, to create a surrounding sound that allures them. The song “Mistress of Darkness”, as an example, has a thunderous start, and then it goes through different tempos, softening at some passages but with a dark ambiance all the time. The echoed vocals add an extra layer of gloominess, and the all-time present bass enhances the heavy sound.
With a global sound that recreates the spirit of Black Metal from the 90s, this album is full of details that add something extra to the songs: the murky guitar solo in “Pale like Death” and also its final part, where drums speed up and sound like lethal machinery; “Burning in the Fire Eternal” has an eerie intro, guitar and bass create the perfect atmosphere; the dark and fragile plucked guitar that breaks the steamroller drum pace in “From the Depths of the Abyss”; the abrupt changes of tempo in drums at the closing theme “Embraced by the Darkness Cold” increase the coldness provided by the raw guitar with each turn, and the album ends with a feeling of total inner devastation. If that was the purpose, well, it’s been achieved. 9/10
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9/10 Epic Storm
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