Nightbringer

With their third album, Nighbringer set a new standard for commitment to a genre, bringing as much black as you can handle. Hailing from Colorado (and featuring amazing stage names like Nox Corvus), they produce black metal on par with anything that's come out of Europe. With songs ranging from five to seven minutes on average, these aren't short entries into the world of black metal ― each track is a pulsating entity of malevolence. Everything you'd expect from a band that describe their sound as "orthodox black metal" is here: surging blast beats that sound like a demonic march; an abyss of growls and screams; ravenous riffs covering a spectrum of highs and lows; grand choric gestures; solemn hymns; and a baroque sense of doom. Lyrically, Hierophany of the Open Grave is basically one long invocation of death and evil. Each song reads like a black sermon. Lines such as, "Oh Highest One, Great Devourer, Universal Solvent, may I become at one with Thee!" ("Lucifer Trismegistus") are not uncommon. It's not quite Shakespeare, but the band's commitment to a renaissance-sounding syntax and vocabulary is a welcome treat and completely fitting with the epic, world shattering sounds on Hierophany of the Open Grave.