SHINING The Darkroom Sessions CD (2004)

Swedish black metal has a reputation for eating its own, and Shining came up in that tradition before deciding the genre's rules weren't dark enough for them. The Darkroom Sessions captures the band mid-metamorphosis, recorded during a period when Niklas Kvarforth was steering the project toward something more suffocating and personal than the orthodox black metal template, blending jazz-inflected dissonance with genuine nihilism in a way that made most of their peers look like they were just playing dress-up.

If you've been sleeping on Shining because the later avant-garde stuff seemed like too much of a detour, start here. If you already know, you already know.

Format: CD. Country of origin: Sweden. Genre: Black Metal. Original release year: 2004.

Fans of: Burzum, Deathspell Omega, Lifelover, Bethlehem.