Licht Des Urteils
Uhraamo

Hailing from Tampere, Finland, LICHT DES URTEILS emerged in 2019 with their first demo, later released on tape by Worship Tapes. Since then, the band have taken to the stage and sharpened their attack, which is simultaneously idiomatic and defiant of traditional Finnish black metal. A reconfigured lineup finalized itself in 2020, with the resultant full-length Uhraamo being the first recorded document of this lineup.

Ghastly and gutted, Uhraamo is pure filth shotgunned into the stratosphere. Heaving and hammering is LICHT DES URTEILS' surge here, with savage low-end anchoring riffing that ably splits the difference between rusty chainsaw and cursed nightsky. Indeed, it's that very real sense of physicality - as in a real band, playing together as one, rather than pieces cut & pasted with a computer - that ever-present DANGER, which renders Uhraamo such a compelling listen. It's pure & proud BLACK METAL, to be sure, but the songwriting's nothing short of electrifying and the production's powerful and punishing: simple pleasures, but sublime ones. And the hysteria only intensifies as the album plays on...

Finnish black metal is surely in no short supply, but only the nastiest banners are united under PURITY THROUGH FIRE. For those who dig among the dungeons for the late/great likes of Impious Havoc, Vitsaus, Catenatum Lucem, and the short-lived Syöpä, then LICHT DES URTEILS' Uhraamo is mandatory listening.