DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT

Gleefully fogging up an already hazy line between black metal fury and post-metal magnificence, DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT are a band driven by the crushing power of emotions. In the 15 years since releasing their self-titled debut, the Germans have grown steadily and surely, while digging ever deeper into their well of atmospheric mastery. It comes a little surprise that "Innern" is an album that will have the hairs on your arms standing rigidly to attention, but the way that this band sustain that affect, through both visceral, sandstorms of riffing and rage, and prolonged passages of tender melancholy, is genuinely remarkable. Their songs seem to bubble up from the scorched earth of the real world and straight into the night sky, exploding like shooting stars and dazzling with a strange but compelling mixture of illuminating opalescence and amorphous darkness: hardly the stuff of traditional black metal, nor of the often-monochrome breadth of post-metal. "Innern" harnesses both warmth and iciness, chaos and calm. It is, unusually, a colorful and turbulent statement that uses pitiless blastbeats and oases of calm with the same lethal precision. Goosebumps will come, if only after the physical might of extreme metal subsides.

The first track, "Marter", is a startling way to open the emotional floodgates. There are a handful of bands operating in similar territory — WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM and WALDGEFLÜSTER among them — but there is something unique about the way DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT follow their meticulous musical path. Winding through dense blizzards of brutality, there is a gracefulness to the band's delivery that turns their elegantly constructed walls of noise into tangibly supernatural reckonings. It's impressive and bombastic, but also markedly beautiful and reassuring. Here torment and relief intertwine, as blearily human as it gets. "Xibalba" is even more otherworldly and yet rooted in the real. A ten-minute ritual, its stated, lyrical aim of combatting the disintegration of our beleaguered spirits with inward-looking resolve hitting its target with untold strength and dignity. Austere melodies fizz and flutter beneath vistas of rapacious urgency, as frontman Nikita Kamprad's barbaric howls puncture the distortion like spikes through skin. Again, it would be easy to simply stand back and admire what DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT are doing here, but these songs give such intense, gravitational pull that it might be easier to meekly succumb and embrace the maelstrom from its corrosive, fiery center. "Innern" is not an album to observe aloofly from the outside.

The most stunning revelation comes as a moment of respite dissolves into a grand act of cathartic finality. "Finisterre III" is a mournful, piano-led interlude, and is pursued with voracious charm by "Forlorn": almost certainly the most deliciously fragile song DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT have released to date, and one that cries out for emotional nourishment and cerebral fortification. It is sung in English, seemingly to heighten its universal resonance, and walks a slow road towards its eventual, rolling waves of crescendo and dark euphoria, anointed by gothic bass and shrouded in the ethereal. When it ends, its absence feels like a loss. It is rare to be touched by music this extreme, but "Innern" has more heart than hate, and a quiet intelligence that will make its songs linger in the memory long after night has turned to day. Stunning.