HORDE OF HEL's history dates back to the dawn of the new, cursed millennium, when John Odhinn Sandin - previously in Odhinn, and concurrently of the late/great In Battle - wanted to strike out on his own with a project that significantly differed sonically from those bands. It would take years before a first recording arrived, but at last it did in 2009 with the debut album Blodskam. In one sense, HORDE OF HEL here exhibited a refreshing take on industrialized black metal - martial, malevolent, mesmerizing - but in another, more accurate sense, with Odhinn's emphasis on dark ambient atmospheres, Blodskam transcended the "industrial black metal" demi-tag altogether. In 2011, the second HORDE OF HEL album arrived in the form of Likdagg, courtesy of REGAIN RECORDS. Immediately, a change was felt: the more lumbering 'n' loping mid-tempos of Blodskam have been replaced by thoroughly berserker drum-programming, which increased the ultraviolence a hundredfold. A reflection of the increasingly darker times, Likdagg's utterly remorseless, unrelentingly unhinged speed slaughtered listeners with apparent ease...that is, if that listener possessed the sturdy constitution to step forward to that onslaught to begin with. Many years passed, and many presumed HORDE OF HEL dead. Far from it: the most ULTRA ultraviolence was simply lying in wait! And now it has arrived with D-den Nalkas, doubtlessly the most extreme (or at least extremely unforgiving) record you'll hear all year - or perhaps all decade. All the rudiments of its no-less-considerable predecessor have been pushed into the red: drums reaching 500 BPM, the guitars slicing like barbed wire at warp speed, vocals approaching blackout levels of seething vitriol, the ambient elements wrapping all around the wreckage in dizzying, disorienting darkness. But, this new guise of HORDE OF HEL is a unified trio - a connection between and within three individuals - and thus are its effects felt across D-den Nalkas. Of them, perhaps the most pronounced are the integration of real drums from the ever-prolific Nils "Dominator" Fjellstr-m, who played with Odhinn in In Battle and more recently in The Wretched End and Nordjevel, among others; this symbiosis straddles the line between over-the-top gabber and black metal's outermost reaches of intensity. Likewise, the arrival of vocalist Sanctvs (also of Nordjevel) has injected an even greater intensity into HORDE OF HEL's already-incomprehensibly-intense attack. Simply put, put on headphones and your ears will be absolutely PUNISHED by D-den Nalkas! The more things stay the same - or stay bleak, the Apocalypse at hand with the current worldwide pandemic - the more things change, and so too do HORDE OF HEL. With mastering by Devo (MARDUK) at Endarker Studio, D-den Nalkas is the soundtrack to the literal END.
