Just 13 months after emerging from a 17-year silence, Mütiilation’s Meyhna’ch has delivered the rarest artifact in black metal: an album that confronts what three decades of uncompromising darkness actually costs. Mütiilation has returned with surprising swiftness following 2024’s Black Metal Cult, marking their shortest turnaround between albums to date. While Black Metal Cult served as a clunky homecoming after a 17-year hiatus, celebrating Meyhna’ch’s enduring love for black metal through a combination of styles he’d experimented with over the years, the album felt rushed and overly reliant on standard black metal tropes despite occasional flashes of brilliance. Pandemonium of Egregores takes the strongest ideas from that return and pushes them to new heights of ambition, as Meyhna’ch explores the tragedy of creating black metal into one’s third age with his most complex and brutally honest album to date.
This is the band’s greatest performance in purely technical terms. Kham’s drumming is frantic yet extremely precise, accentuating chord changes during the faster passages, but as heard in the “Shadows over the Valley” breakdown, he doesn’t sit back idly, constantly providing fills while the dry, thudding stomp of his kick drum adds even more weight to the slow and pondering sections. Meyhna’ch’s playing is breathtaking here, as his main riff form employs a rapid yet syncopated gallop more akin to power metal, but with an impeccable ear for melody that allows him to use the harmonic minor scale to reach depths of despair despite how the riff shape naturally lends itself to triumph. “Fifty Winters,” the autobiographical centerpiece, displays this harsh contrast between riff shape and melody to perfection from its second riff onwards, as Meyhna’ch details his withered condition, how the prime years are far gone and what remains is weariness without wisdom. Of note too is his lead playing, which while sparse and for the most part minimalistic, genuinely amplifies the greatness of the underlying riffs and emphasizes the tragic mood similarly to his early classics.
Songwriting-wise, Pandemonium of Egregores is remarkably concise compared to previous works, standing as the band’s shortest album yet and solely focused on the concept of Meyhna’ch as an egregore, a thought-form that has possessed William Roussel, leading him to this old and withered version of himself with nothing left to gain, warning listeners of the future that awaits them. There is a logical continuity between the songs, and each of the four proper tracks is solely focused on expressing the reality of this downfall, creating an unusually tight bond between lyrics and music that makes them essential to each other rather than treating the lyrics as an afterthought pasted on top. There is very little repetition of ideas, yet each idea is fully developed and emotionally potent, there’s no time for extended atmospheric passages or gradual build-ups. Each song revolves around a few rapid galloped riffs, a lengthy yet active breakdown that slowly transitions to a powerful conclusion, with leads injected at crucial points. Every second counts on Pandemonium of Egregores, and this economy is what makes it so incisive.
Pandemonium of Egregores is not only a return to form in the unforgiving and youth-oriented world of black metal, but the first honest statement of what it truly means to grow old in metal without any pretensions or delusions of still being the same band. Black metal thrives on honesty and intimate expression of the self, and Mütiilation achieves this through genuine mastery of the genre and a willingness to evolve while retaining the elements that made their past albums indisputably powerful statements. Pandemonium of Egregores sits in the pantheon of the greatest black metal albums of the last two decades, ranking just below the genre’s absolute finest works. It stands as a unique expression that other aging legends should take note of, a blueprint for how to confront mortality without abandoning the darkness that defined you. This is what three decades of uncompromising darkness costs, and the bill has finally been paid in full.
