MYRKVID – Nihilist

RELEASE YEAR: 2025
BAND URL: https://lnk.to/nihilist

Following a rather obnoxious and pointless intro piece, the French underground black metal constellation known as Myrkvid launches into a full-frontal attack on the senses and delivers its potently bleak and destructive old-school madness in a convincing manner.

What we have here is called Nihilist and harkens back to the mid-90s in terms of tone, style, atmosphere, song structures, and evil intent. I distinctly recall not being terribly impressed with its predecessor, namely the mediocre Demons Are Inside released in 2018, but this 2025 slab of raw and undiluted ugliness is fortunately a better and more noteworthy affair all-around; the arrangements are less predictable, and the riffs are stronger and carry anguish and misanthropy – particularly the dissonant ones. What fails to excite this scribe this time around also are the vocals as they often appear monotonous, one-dimensional, or just plain uneventful for lack of a better word. Still, the positives outweigh the negatives throughout, and “The Old Temples Below,” “Wolfpack,” and the Gorgoroth-esque “Blackening Millenium” are well-crafted and robust tunes that deliver the sinister goods. Honorable mention also goes to the catchy and grim “Virgin Bitch – Bastard Son” and the epic “The Neverending Running Snakes.”

Nihilist will neither set the world afire nor is it outstanding, but it serves its purpose and is a solid affair with a venomous aura to it. It is undoubtedly an improvement on Myrkvid’s previous offerings, and as stated previously, this is raw and direct. In short, this is darkness channeled into an unpolished soundscape, and what it lacks in originality it makes up for in energy and urgency.