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Norrsköld, this young, five-piece Swedish Metal act formed in Gothenburg in 2012, has slowly but surely built up its career as one of the most noteworthy and talented Swedish extreme Metal groups that have all potential to become even better known and more largely accepted among fans of the genre.

Withering Virtue - The Second Chapter, as the album's title hints at, is Norrsköld's second full-length studio album (their very promising debut album, Reflections of the Night Sky, was released in 2014). On this album, it all seems like little pieces are falling into the right places: Withering Virtue is clearly the band's most well crafted yet ambitious work to date. Norrsköld's mixture of Black Metal and melodic Death Metal with some Folk music elements thrown in is very enjoyable to listen to. At times, they remind me of many of those Swedish melodic Black/Death Metal bands that crawled out from the Gothenburg scene back in the first half of the 90s and released their albums on small but growing Swedish labels Wrong Again Records and No Fashion Records, and at other times they make the listener understand that something interesting yet killer is bubbling under the water. The end result is something in between, and it has to be mentioned that there's a serious attempt at accomplishing something 'old-new' music-wise. The songs on Withering Virtue all have some standout potential: all the instruments are played well and skillfully, with enough charm to them and I'll be damned if some of you went and said, "Nah, nothing grabs me on this album..." because Norrsköld are idea-rich and musically speak for themselves.

Atmospheric, beautiful, haunting, soul-piercing and adventurous are just a few adjectives to describe the songs on this album and it's relatively easy to throw this record among the fans of early In Flames, Dissection, Nalgfar, Sacrilege (Swe), Eucharist and so on.