Artist: Nightside
Country: Finland
Label: Purity Through Fire
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2024

Last year Nightside returned with the demo ‘Lions’, their first release in 22 years. A glorious return, as the Finnish Black Metal outfit combined an excellent sense of fast-paced Swedish melody with symphonic touches into a highly catchy formula that had me longing for more. As it was intended to serve as a taster for the new album, we indeed didn’t have to wait long for the following release as May 2024 saw the release of the band’s second album ‘Death from the North’ courtesy of Purity Through Fire.

All three tracks that were featured on ‘Lions’ make their return on the album, in addition to five new tracks. And on their newest album Nightside solidifies the formula that they had displayed on the demo, or their past material for that matter, essentially sounding like Dissection (mostly in the vein of ‘The Somberlain’) and Sacramentum mixed with the symphonic elements of Emperor and Dimmu Borgir. The melodic guitars are at the centre of each song, although within the tweaked production of the album, the keyboards are highlighted a little bit more compared to the demo. The pace is often relentless, but variation in the drum tempos add that little bit of extra pressure in the atmosphere. Some songs break with this mould, like the more threatening and less melody-centred (and very much Dimmu Borgir influenced) ‘Disciples of Darkness’ or the more chugging and midtempo tracks ‘The Dying Sun’ and ‘In Solitude I Wander’. But undoubtedly it’s really the melodic highpaced catchiness of for example the title track, ‘There Won’t Be Another Dawn’ or ‘Gates of Hell’ that are the best thing going for the band.

While the redeeming qualities of catchy melodies draped upon a rather unrelenting pace certainly warrant praise, there’s a couple of things that for me personally take away a bit of the upsides of the demo. One is certainly the production, which had a grittier and rawer edge on the demo which I personally prefer. To me this is best manifested in the strongest track ‘Gates of Hell’, which appears on both releases and just comes across as much more compelling and convincing on the demo. Another is the musical formula. The rather uniform speed and melodic focus is just a little bit too one-dimensional and becomes somewhat predictable. This seems to be a recurring thing with the band and their relation with the full-length format, at least from my personal point of view, as I also found the debut album ‘The End of Christianity’ to be far less infatuating than the band’s first demo or ‘Ad Noctvm’ EP. Similarly, ‘Lions’, with it shorter duration and punchier sound, simply is more appealing to me.

I wouldn’t go as far as calling ‘Death from the North’ a letdown. There’s still plenty of catchy melodies throughout the record that make it worth a listen, and Nightside delivers exactly what they promised on the demo. But I cannot deny a sense of disappointment either. For me, ‘Death from the North’ is just a bit too much of the same thing and I would much rather spin the demo.