I am very much enjoying Myrkur’s Mareridt. It’s hard not to compare Amalie Bruun to Sharon den Adel of Within Temptation. If I had a gun to my head I would say, in an embarrassingly overly simplistic way, that Amalie is more experimental and Sharon is more technically pure. This, of course, is the problem of comparison. Not only is it fundamentally subjective, it suggests a kind of contest in life, as if one should endure and another should not. Yet there is more than enough room for both, so much so that the greatness of the two combined does not even begin to exhaust the possibilities.

I appreciate that Amalie sees herself in the tradition of black metal, and tracks like Ulvinde display it well. I only wish she would have pursued it further. The hand of Garm of Ulver is apparent from beginning to end, but I only wish it was more the hand of Bergtatt and less of everything post-Nattens-madrigal.