“Plague Of Cancers” pummels with buzz-saw guitar tone and groove-laden riffs, its HM-2 chainsaw buzz the core of its attack. It may tread familiar terrain, but when it hits right it still smacks like death metal born to be unleashed.
“Soma” moves like a slow tide of ash and memory, equal parts meditative and suffocating. It doesn’t always find its direction, but when it does, BÅKÜ sound like a band discovering the beauty hidden inside exhaustion.
“Embers” drifts between grief and grandeur, letting strings and exotic tones bloom over ruinous guitar swells and mournful silence. Its lengths falter occasionally, but when it catches fire it burns hotter than many peers.
“To Conquer Eternal Damnation” is the sound of melodic death metal clawing its way out of the grave with conviction rather than nostalgia. It’s the kind of album that feels cut from the same cloth as mid-90s Gothenburg, but scoured with modern production grit and a distinctly Bay Area sense of weight.
“Think of You” moves between brightness and ruin, refusing to settle for harshness without melody or melody without edge. Its structural familiarity sometimes dulls surprise, but its passion and refined voice keep it compelling.
“The Bestiary” feels like a fever dream carved from stone and smoke, where heavy metal’s past is reborn as mythic theatre. It’s imperfect, sprawling, and utterly sincere and honest.
“Solastalgia” feels like the year’s slow descent into silence, with fallen leaves, fading light, and the ache of something ending. It may waver in pacing, but its sincerity and sense of place make it linger long after the air turns cold.
Blackbraid “III” strikes like a ritual lived out loud, a blackened odyssey that binds ancestral echoes. Its greatest strength is how it never lets the listener settle in its tension and its haunting voice.
“From Us With Hate” roars with enough speed, fury, and classic riffing to satisfy thrash purists, even as it occasionally leans too heavily on familiar blueprints.
“Defiance” is a hammer blow wrapped in poetry, part chainsaw-death, part atmospheric lament, testifying that Nightbearer are more than just worshippers of old Swedish death—they are its sharper, angrier evolution. The album stumbles just a few times in pacing and mix, but even those stumbles are over terrains of riffs and ideas worth stumbling over.