Every year, there is always so much happening with new releases that it is actually impossible to keep up with it all. Particularly with black metal! It always feels like there’s a new act on the block or, at the very least, some fresh album that so many are fawning over for one reason for another, and it’s a task for me to keep up with it all even half decently. Sometimes, I never get around to deserving releases, but I always try. When the debut from Silver Knife came out earlier in the year, it was promptly put on my “to-do” list, but I only just now got around to listening to it. And it’s with albums like this that you’ll find me kicking myself in the ass for not investigating sooner.

It’s interesting to me that almost whenever a black metal album like this gets widespread attention, it’s often an album that’s rawer and even with a somewhat classic sound that people latch onto. I couldn’t say why such a thing feels more often to someone like me, but it’s clearly often enough to their point where I went into this debut thinking that Silver Knife was going to be another raw black metal band. And, for the most part, I feel correct but there’s much more to it than that. Where the first half of “Unyielding / Unseeing” fits that bill almost too well, it’s from the fourth track to the end that Silver Knife does not shy away from shaking things up just a little bit. A little of post-metal goes a long way and it’s there that Silver Knife really works their magic as it shows us an entirely different side to “Unyielding / Unseeing” – almost like the mid-point was the band flipping the coin for their sound – that works amazingly well with the raw power that was on full display for the entrance of the album, and it’s across both that we get a great idea of what Silver Knife is capable of with both sounds being fully fleshed out, energized, and full of talent that just cannot be put down for even a second. It allows this album to quickly and oddly become something that’s as dynamic as it is straight-forward with reverence for the classics of the style while slowly carving out a path for Silver Knife to become a name truly to know in the vast realm of black metal.

This is a debut that can, and clearly already has, cause ripples across the entire scene to give us what should easily be considered one of the most promising bands that we’ve seen in some time. It’s the exact sort of thing to make people go crazy with Silver Knife showing us exactly what they’re capable of on the very first go to make “Unyielding / Unseeing” a need-to-know mammoth release all the way around.

LISTEN to “Unyielding / Unseeing” on Bandcamp here.

LIKE Silver Knife on Facebook here.