Five years since this band's last piece of pagan mastery, Uinuos syömein sota, and I worried maybe they had fallen into the pandemic gap and disappeared, but here we finally have a proper follow-up to that great album, and it is every bit as good as I wanted it to be.

This band is still treading ground that was first broken by Moonsorrow, but they do it so well that I can't take anything away from them for that. Much like Finsterforst or even Pagan Reign, this band creates a unified sound that evokes folk music but with metallic instrumentation, builds massive, riff-fueled song structures, and piles up layer on layer of atmosphere for an album that is fierce and heavy but freighted with mood and meaning. I think this one is a bit more open and melodic than their previous works, but the differences are not that pronounced. I do, however, think this is their best so far.