Naglfar fans would be more than pleased with this highly anticipated and very long awaited new album. This band hasn't put out a record since Téras back in 2012. Naglfar has been my all time favorite black metal band since the late 2000s when I first discovered them in high school.
For those of you who don't know, Naglfar is a melodic black metal band hailing from Umeå, Sweden. Here is a fun and gross fact about the band's name. Naglfar in Norse Mythology was a giant ship made entirely from finger and toe nails of the dead. As soon as I heard a few months ago that new material would be released from this band through Century Media Records, I quickly put the hard copy CD on pre-order. Unfortunately due to the current global pandemic I didn't get the CD in the mail a week before the album's release date, so I had to listen through my Amazon Music app.
The first song is the album titled track "Cerecloth". One thing I noticed right away was how the guitar riff sounded very similar to the riff from the song "A Swarm of Plagues" from my personal favorite album Pariah. Though the riffs sounded alike, any real Naglfar fan would tell you that the songs are completely different. This is a good thing because it shows their fans that they know how to keep the old sound in the new record. The next song "Horns" is a crushing and straight forward black metal song that makes the listener beg for more. It is also a song that lets first time listeners get a real taste for Kristoffer "Wrath" Olivius' raspy and hellish vocals.
"Like Poison for the Soul" begins with a surprisingly groovy bass line performed by Alex Impaler before continuing to rape your ears with more ghoulish black metal. It's a work of art that warms you up for what the rest of the album has in store for you. For the 4th track, we have the song "Vortex of Negativity". It starts off with the ominous sounds of a black electric guitar being quickly consistently plucked to make an eerie tune. When the beat picks up after 10 seconds we can visualize the simple yet beautifully shot music video for this song in our heads. If you could hear colors, it would be yellow lights illuminating fog in a dark forest as a man in a plague masks holds an old lantern. Skipping ahead a couple tracks we come across a gem of a song called "The Dagger in Creation". Musically the most diverse song on this new record. It has its main riff and a calming melody for a miniature solo that really stands out before blasting you in the face with aggressiveness. The drummer Efraim Juntunen (who is also the drummer for the power metal band Persuader is pretty much guaranteed to relentlessly kick your ass with is inhumanly fast double bass blast beat skills for the remainder of this album. Hats off to the guitarists Andreas Nilsson and Marcus E. Norman aka Vargher for writing such a soothing intro for the song "Necronaut" and pretty much giving us nothing but noticeably great riffs through the entirety of your careers with Naglfar.
With all this praise I am giving to this band and all their musical accomplishments over the last 28 years, I can't not give this release anything less than a solid 9.5/10. The only reason I don't give it a full 10/10 is because it still just isn't as musically or lyrically catchy as their best 2005 album Pariah. To me, this Cerecloth album is the band's equivalent to: Sheol, Harvest and Téras.