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This band used to be called Cold Northern Vengeance, a bit of a mouthful. It's marketed as Epic Viking Metal, but I'm not hearing a lot of that here. In fact, that's the thing with Desolate Ways to Ultima Thule: It's all over the place and there's 73 minutes of never really knowing what's around the corner. I didn't really like the album at first and it took a few listens for it to start sinking in. So yeah, there are some cuts that have more of that Viking metal vibe, but there's a lot of weird stuff going on here. Some things sound right out of a pissed-off crossover thrash album, which really sticks out as it's not a great fit and the same can be said for the couple of spoken passages. Where the album is most interesting to me is when it sticks to black metal where you get quite a serving of fast and brutal, razor-sharp black metal, sometimes even quite raw. Lots of stuff going on here, too much in fact, but there's enough interesting music on the album to warrant a look and maybe just extract what you like and leave out the rest.