Review by Jeger on May 14, 2026.

The time has arrived! Yoth Iria's fiercely-awaited Metal Blade Records debut, "Gone With The Devil", is here and with all proper fanfare for such an exciting occasion. This is what it's all about, right? You pay your dues toiling the Underground, you make a proud name for yourself and then you make the logical next move: the Big Leagues… Where the Titans of the international scene dwell in austerity as they overlook a thriving Black Metaldom that they themselves helped to found, shape and transform. What a proud accomplishment for BM! To have the music and the band's image cast in such a glossy mainstream luminescence? Congratulations are in order, are they not?

On the flip side of the coin, we have a band that - since their inception in 2019 - have been an elite presence wherever they've chosen to venture and under the vision of no matter what label they've chosen to have represent them and the modus operandi as of Yoth Iria past has always been to represent the Greek scene with integrity, just like their fellows: Rotting Christ, Varathron and Kawir who've all, despite having been doing their thing for decades, never crossed into Metal Blade, Nuclear Blast or Reigning Phoenix territories. Watain is the only mainstream Black Metal band outside of Marduk that I can think of who have managed to maintain their legitimacy as a true Black Metal entity, despite their being signed to a major label. They've simply never lost touch with the essence of those first pure days of their career and of the scene.

With notoriety and more importantly, with money, life begins to present itself to you in the form of problems and complications that over time begin to cause you to harbor feelings of resentment towards some of the things that have begun to cripple your cause: time constraints, creative vision conflicts and this feeling that your work means less now than it did when you were creating art for different reasons. These are the pitfalls that I imagine accompany being signed to a label like Metal Blade. But hey, the new album sounds great… On May 8, Greece's Yoth Iria released their third LP, "Gone With The Devil", via Metal Blade Records.

This whole thing feels like it might have been thrown together at the last minute for the new label. It was a matter of a few months it seemed before Yoth Iria was signed and now a brand new LP to boast? Simmer down now… At one point, Yoth Iria couldn't even play live because The Magus is of the mind that BM is an art form deserving of intimacy and that it should not be played before a live audience. Now? I'm still trying to wrap my head around the Boy's Choir that makes up the entirety of "The Blind Eye Of Antichrist", all these dramatic cleans, the sanitized production quality and this feeling like I'm watching the latest movie directed by whoever wrote Troy or 300. Is this even Black Metal anymore? There's a line that bands like Patriarkh or even the mighty Rotting Christ have crossed over where the music is so grandiose or gaudy even that it becomes difficult classify it under any genre of BM. That line has been crossed blatantly with "GWTD".

There are tracks from "Gone With The Devil" like "I, Totem" that encapsulate everything that has historically made this band great and then we have others like "Blessed Be He Who Enters" that feel like fluff or a generic Yoth Iria song kinda like the Jim Carrey imposter: looks and sounds about right but something is off… Yoth Iria has changed a good bit over the past seven years, and for some bands, that can be a good thing but I'm not so sure here, besides, they can't all be winners like the infectiously rhythmic "Once In A Blue Moon" or the epic, "Harut, Government, Fallen" - two of this convoluted album's high watermarks.

As long as Yoth Iria continues to create albums like "Gone With The Devil" and as long as fans (not enthusiasts anymore) continue to suck it up like sweet nectar then there will no doubt be a bright future for the band. You can't really blame the guy for wanting to make a living making music. Maybe don't call yourself a Black Metal band anymore, because this album is one big Blackened Metal salad that just fails to hit all those familiar BM sweet spots.

Rating: 7 out of 10