I have a soft spot for musicians who evolve instead of ossify and Roman V, the singular backbone behind Bizarrekult, has demonstrated that elasticity on Vi Overlevde and Den Tapte Krigen; as such, Alt Som Finnes felt like a turning point waiting to happen. After a week with it, it sounds like exactly that: a project that shed its need to justify itself and instead figured out precisely how far the black metal framework can be widened before it starts collapsing under its own ambition.
You can hear that widening in how cohesive Alt Som Finnes is, and cohesive here doesn’t mean playing it safe. Every outward expansion feels intentional: blast beats are intact, riffs claw with familiar urgency, but genre tropes are treated like scaffolding instead of a cage. Guitars hum under the skin from the outset, and the double bass in ‘Blikket Hennes’ pulsates right against your sternum, creating a quietly destabilising atmosphere that’s subtly nudged towards the avantgarde by Dødheimsgard‘s guest vocalist Yusaf Parvez. The album extends that logic with further guest vocalists from Predatory Void and MØL, each adding a new dimension without splintering the record’s centre of gravity. Bizarrekult has evolved its identity enough to afford to let others in.
Alt Som Finnes carries aggression and warmth in equal measure, that emotional duality where distortion reads as freeing, not hostile. The album ebbs and flows constantly, building, collapsing, retreating, returning. There is space here too, the kind that gives sadness time to breathe and burrow. Its production is crucial to this flexibility. Nothing is buried for the sake of murk. Instruments are allowed to articulate themselves, guitars retain their sharp edges, and the low end is thick without sounding bloated. This is not post-black metal you tire of halfway through. ‘Håp’ begins almost gently, vocals leaning folky and fragile before the song detonates in slow motion. Lina R. of Predatory Void drifts in on female vocals and the register shifts into something unexpectedly tender. ‘Drøm’, sung in Russian as if the language itself is colder, then changes the entire emotional temperature again, more severe, the walls moving in closer, and yet even here the warmth has not entirely retreated. Bizarrekult knows exactly where to drill the aggression in, and when to pull back, letting clarity and weight coexist.
Across three languages — Norwegian, Russian, English — the album expands its scope. The closer, ‘Tomhet’, Bizarrekult’s first song in English, lands the thesis plainly: “Am I alone like this? No, we are many.” Society, conscience, relationships, identity are all present, circling beneath the surface. Overall, Alt Som Finnes feels imbued with meaning yet remarkably listenable. Sadness registers even when one does not speak the language, threaded through with something that resembles hope. Scandinavian-coded in its restraint and bleakness, modern in execution, this sounds like political disillusionment meets existential depression and somehow it lands as cathartic and not suffocating. Or maybe that’s just me, projecting my own woes. Either way, this is a solid album I can’t get enough of. Post-black metal, evolved.
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