What’s there left to say about Kvaen beyond five little words, four of which are "fire?” Back in early 2020, Jakob Björnfot came out of seeming nowhere with a fully formed meloblack/speed metal aesthetic and a keen songwriting ear to deliver one of the the most vital sounding throwback records of the year. The Funeral Pyre had something going for it that a lot of good, even great records don’t. Beyond technical musicianship—which Björnfot most certainly has—beyond reverence for a genre’s history, that record was fun. As. Hell. It didn’t matter that no new ground was being broken, it only mattered that Björnfot was driving it like it was stolen. At the time I wrote that he played his style "with such verve and venom that it sounds as fresh as when it first emerged from the primordial forests.” Two years, a global pandemic and widespread civil and martial unrest later, how does Kvaen hold up on the all important sophomore release The Great Below? I’ll be kind and sum it up early: this album is fire, fire, fire, fucking fire. 

The Great Below finds Björnfot at times replicating his scorching meloblack successes, and at times expanding upon them with further forays into speed, thrash and especially Viking metal. One remarkable thing about The Funeral Pyre was how each of the first four tracks, taken in isolation, could be considered a near-perfect specimen of melodic ferocity. If you took "The Great Below” and shuffled it into those four songs at random, no one would question it coming from the same inspired songwriting session. There’s perhaps a thrashier edge to it overall, and this is repeated in the other song that feels like it came from the same head space as the debut, "Sulphur Fire.” With a blood pumping chorus that’s basically just shouting the song’s title, it makes a nice companion piece to Pyre‘s "Yee Naaldlooshii.” The largest departure from the debut comes in the form of two slower tracks that draw from the epic scope of Viking-era Bathory.