DRAUGVEIL & SELVNATT · Blades & Roses | WHITE LP

Bone white vinyl.

Background information about 'Blades & Roses'

Two names, one vision, and a manifesto that lands like a gauntlet thrown at your feet. Draugveil and Selvnatt have joined forces for "Blades & Roses", a record that takes the frostbitten severity of early nineties Norwegian black metal and dresses it in gothic high-fantasy armour — knights, thorns, doomed nobility, all of it. They call the result Romantic Black Metal, and honestly, the term fits better than most invented sub-genres ever do. This is music built on a deliberate, thrilling contradiction: riffs that are ugly, cold and utterly sincere, wrapped in a visual world of sorrowful grandeur.

And what a ride it is. "Blades & Roses" sprawls out like a concept album should, swinging between furious, tremolo-picked assaults and stretches of ambient desolation where the guitars fall away and leave you standing in fog. The production keeps the second-wave spirit intact — nothing polished, nothing safe — while the songwriting reaches for something grander and more theatrical than plain aggression. There is genuine melancholy buried under the violence here, a sense of tragic romance that makes the fast parts hit harder and the quiet parts linger far longer than you expect.

What makes this record so fascinating is its ambition. Draugveil and Selvnatt are not content with preaching to the converted; they are reaching for the goth crowd, for the kids raised on genre-fluid sounds, for anyone drawn to beauty with a blade in it. It is a high-risk move, and it works. "Blades & Roses" feels like the opening chapter of something much bigger.

For fans of: Emperor, Satyricon, Dimmu Borgir, Ulver, Samael

Other Versions

DIGIPAK CD · 14,99 €

Track listing

A1. Shards
A2. Sacre Cœur
A3. Frozen Throne
A4. Vestige
A5. Unspoken
A6. Gjennom Liv Og Død
B1. Wilted Bloom
B2. Lines Of Sleep
B3. Soiltear (Reimagined)
B4. Lake Of Tears
B5. Afterlife

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