Apocalyptic Steel has had a longer road to release than most. NARGAROTH — the project of René "Ash" Wagner — laid down the core of this album over a single weekend at Trident Studios in California in September 2014, then shelved it on a hard drive while Era of Threnody took priority. The recordings only resurfaced years later: drums re-tracked in Las Vegas, vocals and mixing wrapped at AMP Studios in Duisburg, and the album finally arrives twelve years after those first sessions. And that's exactly how it plays — not a grand statement, just a batch of songs finished on their own terms.
What you get is straightforward black metal in the vein of DARKTHRONE and MAYHEM, with a streak of old-school heavy metal attitude underneath. For the most part it stays direct and raw, more interested in momentum than atmosphere.
The clearest example is "Metalheart," easily one of the catchiest things here. It rides a MOTÖRHEAD-style gallop with Ash's rasp scraped over the top, and that unlikely pairing works far better than it should — the kind of song you keep coming back to.
"Dresden" is the outlier, and the most interesting cut on the record. It isn't really a black metal composition at all. It opens on the wail of an air-raid siren that never fully leaves, holding a heavy, uneasy atmosphere over the whole track. The vocals here turn clean and quiet, with a genuine sadness running through them, and there's an instrumental stretch that steps away from the guitars entirely. Taken whole, it's slow and heavy in a way that leans closer to doomy, almost progressive metal than anything else on the album — and it's all the better for the detour.
Not everything lands. The "Intro" is half a minute of over-the-top, horror-movie female screaming, and it's never quite clear what it's doing here. It sets up a mood the album then abandons, and on a release this lean it's the kind of thing that could have been left off without anyone missing it.
Even the packaging tells the story. The artwork looks like something pulled off a vintage heavy metal shelf — right up until you hit the logo, which is unmistakably black metal. Old-school metal heart, black metal skin: that's more or less the whole record in a single image.
Apocalyptic Steel isn't reinventing anything, and it isn't trying to. It's a dirty, direct, occasionally surprising slab of black metal with one foot in classic heavy metal, and when it leans into that combination — "Metalheart," "Dresden" — it delivers. For fans of DARKTHRONE and MAYHEM who don't mind a bit of MOTÖRHEAD swagger creeping in at the edges, it's worth your time.
Promo provided by Season of Mist.
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