Review by Felix on June 25, 2024.

After two already promising full-lengths in the last five years, Myronath stand at the crossroads. Will they catch up with the top group of Swedish black metal, or will they remain, which would also be honourable, just behind as before? Well, Inferno is not the most original name for a new album, but one can use it as Lemmy’s legacy proves. But it goes without saying that Myronath have nothing in common with Motörhead. The band has not modified its style. Hence we get a very proper portion of typical Swedish black metal which is, by the way, a very good type of the subgenre. It does neither lack melodies nor pressure and the “normally raw” vocals accompany the instrumental “Inferno” (ha!) perfectly. They are not ridiculously brutal, but reinforce the aesthetics of the music. The songs are coherently designed and yes, the spirits of very respected bands like Thy Primordial, Setherial and comparable formations hover through the room. From my point of view, Swedish hordes mosty have a very good instinct for the integration of the necessary quantum of melodies, only the necessary, of course. They embed them much better than their competitors from Norway, not to mention the Finnish ruffians who tend to seek their salvation in brute force anyway. Myronath write another chapter in the glorious history of Swedish blackness.

No doubt, it needs a high degree of competence to walk the fine line between genre-typical harmonies and stormy outbreaks of malignancy. This is especially true considering the fact that the Swedish villains have always delivered an at least somewhat oppressive, gruesome atmosphere. Inter alia 'The Voracious Sphere' fulfils this additional requirement excellently due to its discreet sacral elements. But the haunting guitars are also able to create a massive and dense mood as well. As it is typical for the guys from Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg, their performance creates an impressive flow in each and every title. And, almost even better, the single songs form an extremely homogeneous full-length, although all tracks have an own identity. There is no gradual loss of quality during the 42 minutes of playing time. The opener 'La Selva Oscura' and the closer 'Apotheosis' meet each other on an equal footing. Nothing else applies to the seven songs in between.

It might be that some corpsepainted freaks out there think that this kind of somehow noble Swedish black metal sounds too polished. Indeed, the mix of Inferno is not very coarse-grained. Instead, the album sounds full, vigorous, well defined and transparent yet dense. In short: everything is great here, the songs, the production and perhaps even the artwork, although it looks like the oval brother of Watain’s “Lawless Darkness” at first glance. All that remains is a philosophical question: is it a strength or a weakness of the album that no song stands out? Till Aska gave Djevelkraft an enormously powerful impulse due to its overwhelming quality that remained untouched by the other (also strong) tracks. But the material of Inferno forbids me to moan about the one missing mega-killer, because the average quality of the songs is higher than it ever was in the history of the band and a handful of tunes stand more or less on an equal footing with Till Aska. In particular 'Purity Through Indulgence', 'The Voracious Sphere', 'The Flaming Tombs Of Heresy' and 'Apotheosis' shine with a totally exciting level of hellish, large-formatted, sometimes dramatic and pretty perfect sections. So maybe there is still a gap between the spearhead of Swedish evil and Myronath, but it is getting smaller and smaller with every new album that Myronath release. Only tiny details like the hardly occurring clean vocals leave a little room for improvement. But these things will be fixed on their fourth album, I am sure. For now, I'm simply enjoying Inferno, probably the best BM album of 2024 so far.

Rating: 9.1 out of 10