Holzerhurd: “An Rand” (10″ Vinyl)

With their agglonautic black metal Holzerhurd set off for new wastelands: disconcerting intermediate zones, pale non-places, no man’s land. Holzerhurd is black metal of second nature, romanticism of the mundane. «An Rand», their first EP, charges straight into magical suburbia, where epic battles are raging in bomb shelters, a rider of the cannonball shudders in freezing ecstasy, knights bearing shovels are battling their way through the blizzard.

Inspired by American bands that modernized black metal in the last decade and turned it life-affirming and anti-fascist, Holzerhurd leaves behind black metal’s longing for ghastly primordial times and hostile wilderness as well as its folkloristic cosiness.

In Holzerhurd’s echo chamber of the fraying city, ennui and utopia meet in a poetic world. Ecstatic and impelling, the music settles over the cosmos of suburbia: sublime melodies transfigure the parceled-out tristesse, rhythmically interrupted by riffs that rush through little gardens, driveways and encounter zones.

«An Rand» was recorded in several live sessions in Holzerhurd’s rehearsal space in Zurich and mixed by Andreas Rosczyk (Ultha) at Goblin Sound Studio in Cologne.