There are records that sound as though they were made, and there are records that sound as though they were exhumed—dug from a damp crypt, wax-stained and smothered in cobwebbed incense ash, where the air hangs too heavy to breathe freely. Malum in Se, the full-length debut from Norway’s Funeral Harvest, belongs unmistakably to the latter. This is not a release to shelve neatly alongside modern black-metal productions; this is a statement of pure malign presence, a work that crawls, breathes, and smolders like an offering that refuses to die out.
From the first notes, a chill unfolds—not contrived or calculated, but felt. A coldness that seems to live in bone and stone. The guitars drag their chords like rusted chains across ancient flagstones, melodies echoing down a corridor that disappears into shadow. Not hurried, not frantic. Instead: deliberate, sepulchral, each phrase a step deeper into an unspoken blasphemy. When Funeral Harvest accelerate, it is not to ignite adrenaline, but to intensify the rite—a scourging prayer, not an outburst.
The vocals are a pinnacle of possessed gravity. They do not sing; they expel. A voice that sounds not merely performed but invoked—thick with disdain and devout corruption. No theatrical howl, no distant cosmic sermon—this is earth, flesh, grave-air. There is no safe distance here. This is kneeling in dust.
The production serves the vision with a sinister elegance. Shadowed, raw, yet never muddied—as though light flickers across smoldering incense ash: outlines obscured, intention razor-sharp. A near-sacral tension hangs throughout, as though every moment sits on the cusp of a desecration that never needs to be spoken aloud to be felt. Funeral Harvest understand that true darkness does not rely on volume, but on conviction.
And that conviction is what marks Malum in Se as compelling. This is not nostalgic coldness for its own sake, nor costume-Satanism. It feels like a ritual return to foundation and flame. Beneath the scorched exterior, a solemn melodic undercurrent rises—never indulgent, always restrained—suggesting a restless, almost religious vision beneath the violence.
Malum in Se is not flirting with darkness; it swears fealty to it in form and atmosphere. Funeral Harvest deliver a debut that sounds like an ancient decree—stern, ritualistic, inexorable. It is a record that demands full attention, stillness around it, and the willingness to let dimness settle as the light recedes.
Those who treat black metal as a sacred discipline rather than an aesthetic hobby will find an altar here. For others, only the sound of earth shifting atop a grave that never quite closed will remain.
Ascetic, ritualistic black metal in the vein of Malakhim, Ofermod, and the old, fervent Scandinavian embers. For those unafraid of darkness that does not scream but whispers—and in doing so says far more than daylight ever could.
85/100
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