TAAKE Taake CD (2008)

Hoest has never been interested in making things easy for you, and the self-titled Taake album from 2008 is proof that Norwegian black metal still had places to go when everyone assumed the genre had said everything it needed to say in the nineties.

Where some of their peers were calcifying into self-parody, Taake were getting stranger and more structurally interesting. This record has that raw, cold atmosphere the Bergen scene does better than anywhere else on earth, but there's a melodic undertow running through it that keeps pulling you back under. Corrosive, bleak, and occasionally hypnotic in the way only black metal pulled off convincingly. A record for people who know the difference between atmosphere and wallpaper.

2008 release. Full length album. CD. Black metal. Country of origin: Norway.

Fans of: Darkthrone, Gorgoroth, Immortal, Carpathian Forest, 1349, Marduk