American black metal legends Wolves in the Throne Room provide the soundtrack for Earth’s inevitable demise on the furiously confident Estuary.
Release date: October 23, 2026 | Relapse | Instagram | Bandcamp
In the burgeoning Cascadian black metal scene of the ‘00s, there was no better collection of perennially damp torch-bearers than Olympia’s Wolves in the Throne Room. Formed through a fraternal bond, Aaron and Nathan Weaver crafted music that came from beneath the buried peat of Northwestern forests. Through a series of atmospheric metal albums that had the intimidating heft of Western Red Cedars, WITTR plowed a path through the virgin forests of Washington state. It’s less surprising that the band has stayed together after all this time, than that their state of the union back in 2002 warned of the climate collapse we are living through today. The band’s eighth album Estuary is the sound of hope being washed out to the oceans, the erosion of the banks towards the planet’s definitive decline.
As a science teacher, I’ve watched the climate change debate move from a core part of scientific curriculum in schools to an afterthought. As recently as ten years ago, my kids were all in agreement that climate change was a real issue and needed to be addressed seriously. That was when Greta Thunberg hit the screens. This loss of concern is hard for me to believe, but I think ten years of a world that’s gotten increasingly territorial and self-absorbed, coupled with a global pandemic that made things seem even more worthless, have made caring about anything long term seem impossible when the whole world is falling apart around you.
Luckily, bands like Wolves in the Throne Room do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting for us. Long-term exposure to extreme music can leave one psychologically and emotionally fucked up. It leaves everything cast in the harsh, angular light filtered through the canopy of old growth forests under threat. Any pretense at enjoyment is just putting blinders on a little tighter. Go through the slop that populates the Billboard Top 40 now, and you’ll realize that we’ve always been hiding behind this false Disney-fied sheen of designer water bottles and matching sweats. Meanwhile the fucking planet is burning up.
Wolves in the Throne Room have been entrenched in that ‘meanwhile’ for the better part of the 21st century, and their paganistic, Northwestern black metal is not so much a call to action, as the natural soundtrack for the demise of a living being, particularly one as important as our mother-fucking planet.
On the album’s centerpiece, “Ghosts of the Obelisks”, the band mourns the lost monoliths of our planet’s ancient existence. Wild fires, insect infestations, and our lust for logging have all contributed to the decimation of the Cascade forests of the Northwest, a Biblical plague that has nothing to do with any immortal gods. The song, like much of what the band does, is bound to the sadness found at the outer edges of the forest, a desperate desire to be part of the Earth as part of being alive, an estuary entering from forks of inland seas, feeding the land, the land feeding it.
Alternating between black metal shrieks, guttural death growls, and clean gothic vocals, the song plods, with a slick, clean production that shines like the sun hitting the surface of a forest river. It’s the Pacific Northwest, a sonic explosion of moss and shade. Guitars alternate between furious tremolo-picked washes of ambience over bass-heavy blast beats and slow, sludgy doom, as if the ghosts themselves move between the ancient trunks of Douglas firs, the world’s first organic obelisks.
WITTR’s evolution over the past two decades has been a subtle one, but it is an increasingly powerful, confident explosion of consciousness. Among Scandinavian counterparts, perhaps Enslaved is the best comparison, albeit without the proggy tendencies. Both are intrinsically tied to the soil beneath their calloused feet, and both have found niches sound-wise, particularly with the carefully executed production of their massive sounds.
The first two songs on Estuary, the title song and “Knights of Tiamat”, live in this comfort zone. The songs are almost drone-like in their point of view, and not in the musical way. Picture a modern drone zooming over the canopies of a rich, cloud-covered forest, a viewpoint once gifted only to those with wings and the eyes of millions of years of evolution. They act as reminders that there is no more beautiful world than the one that evolved on this planet sans Homo sapiens, which makes its demise even more profound.
Creatively, the band’s use of keyboards and vocals has always been a focal point of their creative tapestry, and on Estuary these elements are used in a way that heralds in the increased influence of our species on the world around us. In a way, the original lo-fi approach of black metal would never serve WITTR‘s greater purpose, which is to tell the story of their small corner of Gaia, the perpetually wet and living lungs of our North American continent. There is nothing greater, more Shakespearean in its moral failings than watching one of the universe’s greatest miracles- a living, breathing planet- fall prey to the very technology and greed it begat. Even after the Cascade forests become a giant desert of despair, the music of Wolves in the Throne Room will be around to remind us what fools we were. Enjoy it while you can.
