Dutch black metal maestros Fluisteraars slide down the icy abyss on the chilling Jacht der Mysteriën.
Release date: September 11, 2026 | Eisenwald | Instagram | Bandcamp
I was there for the first growl. There, I said it. As the elder statesman of this esteemed publication, I’m probably the only writer on staff who can claim to have been in a 1981 Buick Century listening to Under the Sign of the Black Mark on cassette. This is not so much a claim to fame as simply a statement of fact. It’s also a statement of fact that two of my favorite albums at the time (and still two of my all-time favorites) were Dio’s Holy Diver and Ratt’s Out of the Cellar. These are claims I stand by and have no regrets. Do with it what thou wilt, as they say.
And if I’m going to slip into Olde English we may as well pay tribute to the journey metal has been on over the past half-century. There’s no genre of music that revels in the medieval trials and tribulations of life more than metal, and all of this on the backs of ancient snow dragons from the dungeons of Scandinavia.
Fluisteraars come from the Netherlands, a flat land south of the mountainous fjords of Norway, Finland and Sweden, and yet they have consistently produced some of the coldest atmospheric black metal albums in the world over the past decade. They may as well be from the eternal darkness of the Arctic circle. They’re that cold.
On their sixth full-length record, the Dutch band expands on an already deeply self-reflective sound, resonating with the ‘folkloric mysticism’ richly associated with the band’s homeland. Jacht der Mysteriën is a patient, introspective exploration of a sadness that reaches historical proportions. Audacious and challenging, the three songs that make up the disc unfold like a slow descent into misery.
This is a far cry from Dio and Ratt, and maybe even from Bathory’s primal exploration of evil back in the glorious eighties. It is indicative of the amazing creative growth the genre has seen over its life, and Jacht der Mysteriën does a great job of contributing another gem to the canon of exploratory black metal.
The band’s 2020 record Bloem was released during a perfect storm of viral distress, and was one of my go-to albums during the bleak days of being locked down in my house. Emotional, beautiful, and exploratory, Bloem set the tone for a generational trauma that caught everybody by the wayside. Since then, the band has expanded their sound, preferring to wallow in their misery as opposed to moving on to the next sordid chapter.
Jacht der Mysteriën finds the band at a creative zenith. Starting with the mesmerizing “Grondeloos Donkere Bossen” the band finds melody buried within the frenetic tremolo-picked buzzsaw guitars, drums that gallop like a Friesian horse on the bogs of the north Atlantic, and, of course, the desperate blackened growls and shrieks that have become the lifeblood (death curse?) of extreme metal.
The song revels in its simplicity. I read somewhere that the band compares itself to Tangerine Dream, and there is a similarity between the aesthetic of the German prog-group’s music and Fluisteraars‘s blackened cinematic tapestry. “Grondeloos Donkere Bossen” features a simple progression, four or five chords that turn in on each other, but have an almost synth-like intensity to the melody. It’s a compelling thirteen minute journey into the minds of the Dutch duo.
The three songs on Jacht der Mysteriën reach beyond the ten minute mark, with closer “Zwarte Zomermaan” closing in on twenty minutes. Interestingly enough, the songs don’t lean so much on the oppressive repetitive motifs that characterize a lot of longer atmospheric black metal songs. For instance, “Zwarte Zomermaan” starts off menacingly enough, with a glacially cold riff that feels like the frozen winter winds blowing through a desolate valley of sadness.
Malevolent shrieks and growls come in at the two-minute mark, and the band rides that chill wind to a mid-section that seems to fall off into the darkened crevasse. The melodic heft of the introduction gives way to an ambient, psychedelic interlude that comes from the cold bottom of the chasm. Guitars are drenched in reverb, skeletal voices seem to echo off the icy sides of the dwelling, and the band explodes into a blackened metal fury.
The third act of “Zwarte Zomermaan” is accepting your fate, buried alive at the bottom of the fissure, waiting for death to come slowly and defiantly. There’s a certain peace to all of this, in a macabre way. Giving yourself over is not always the easiest thing to do, but black metal is all about surrendering control. In Bathory’s case, it was giving it up to Satan; in Fluisteraars‘s case, it’s giving it up to the land around us and surrendering ourselves to the planet on which we are nothing more than a blight.
I often think back on the person I was when I slipped that tape into the cassette deck in my beat-up Buick, cruising down Colley Avenue feeling like I discovered something the rest of the world didn’t know about. I’ve carried a piece of that with me ever since, a pervasive desire to give myself over to the music and let it beat me up for a while. If anything, black metal is a method of sonic catharsis, shedding the masks we all put up on a daily basis, bringing a desperately needed moment of self-reflection. It’s hard to be full of yourself when you find yourself freezing to death at the bottom of an Arctic crevasse. Jacht der Mysteriën is the sound of that last breath, the oxygen slowly seeping its way from your red blood cells, as the icy beauty of the world around us welcomes us back to its primal chest. Just enjoy it while it lasts.
