Wolfhorde – Towards the Gates of North

[schema type=”review” name=”Wolfhorde – Towards the Gates of North” description=”Label: Inverse Records” author=”Şebnem Altunkaya” pubdate=”2016-01-22″ ]

Wolfhorde is a folk/black metal band from Finland which was founded in 2000. Since then, the band released 2 singles, 2 EPs and 1 demo. And finally, on January 22 their first full-length album “Towards the Gates of North” will be released.

The band has an interesting name as part of their name is the shape of viking ship. By choosing this name, themes of their songs shows up themselves clearly. Throughout their songs, Wolfhorde tell tales of Viking heritage and mythology instead of victory of battles and war heroes.
As a folk metal listener, the album got my attention with the very first song called “Vegvísir”. With the very first song of the album, we understand the band will take us to the journey towards the gates of north. While the band has influenced from power metal in early years, now they are more into folk metal and even sometimes thrash metal in between. This variation creates attraction on their album as harsh vocals and emotional melodies are used at the same time in one song.
Their heavy and diverse sound makes us witnessing different tales with different emotions. Especially the song “Death Long Due” has a quite different impact on me as it contains both mouth-harp melodies in the beginning and harsh sound during the song with heavy riffs.

Basically, throughout the album, Wolfhorde show us the excellent usage of traditional melodies in combination of harsh metal music. There are so much to say about the album “The Gates of North” but I would like to leave the rest to the folk metal listeners. Make yourself ready to be the part of Wolfhorde’s journey and leave yourself flow through the Viking tales!

Tracklist: 01. Vegvisir 02. Fimbulvetr 03. Taivaankappaleiden Kato 04. Death Long Due 05. The Retribution 06. Unyielding 07. Boundless Agony 08. Lycomania 09. The Gates of North

Links:
Wolfhorde Facebook
Wolfhorde Official