Grabunhold – Frostheim LP

It’s been five long years since GRABUNHOLD’s momentous debut album, Heldentod, which presented the “new old” sound of medieval black metal: Second Wave journeys through silent citadels, sequestered keeps, and dark dungeons, all done in a manner most Teutonic. While a split EP with Circle of Shadows arrived in 2023, the question still lingered: did the Germans still possess the steel to deliver a full-length as compelling – and compellingly modern, despite its ancient origins – as their debut?

On evidence of Frostheim, the answer is a resounding YES. While no great changes have been made to their sturdy aesthetic – songwriting that’s expansive yet stridently classicist, production that’s powerful in its sparkling sheen, and execution that ably balances pagan solemnity with northern bloodlust – on GRABUNHOLD’s sophomore album, there exists an uptick in dynamics that’s both subtle and blanching. Perhaps it’s the stained-glass melodicism that hammers its way to the fore, perhaps it’s that production becoming an iron first lined with velvet, or perhaps it’s some (cascading) combination of the two and magickal more, but Frostheim is a veritable sonic cathedral: each tone is a feast for the senses, and each tone supports a more-detailed but never-belabored palette, but all coalesce into burning-cold BLACK METAL that feels simultaneously decades ahead and behind all else. Of course, this all could be support color across a canvas of simply sterling songwriting, which somehow manages to mix emotion and grandeur in equal measure, and then the skill to perform it as needs to be…only GRABUNHOLD know what fires their forge. Taste their German steel, sharper than ever, with Frostheim!