BURZUM Belus (2010) Digipak CD

Varg Vikernes spent fifteen years in a Norwegian prison. When he walked out, he made a black metal record that sounded like he'd been composing it in his head the whole time, and he probably had.

Released in 2010, Belus marked Burzum's return after a decade and a half of silence, and it didn't try to catch up with where black metal had gone. It went somewhere older, deeper, more ritualistic. Named for a pre-Christian Norse deity of light, the album pulls from Viking mythology and early Scandinavian paganism, all wraithlike tremolo, hypnotic repetition, and vocals that sit somewhere between incantation and static. Whatever your position on the man himself, the music is undeniably significant to the genre's history, and this record is a cornerstone of Norwegian black metal's second wave legacy. The digipak presentation keeps it suitably grim and physical in an age when everyone else went to Spotify.

Format: full length album on CD digipak. Norwegian pressing from 2010. Genre: black metal.

Fans of: EMPEROR, DARKTHRONE, WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM, AGALLOCH, ULVER (early era)