Artist: Talvi
Country: Finland
Label: Forest Gloom
Formats: Demo Tape
Year: 2026
From Finnish, “Talvi” translates to “Winter”, a very befitting name for a band from Finland, a country known for its harsh winter. Therefore it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s two bands around with the same name. The first one recorded and released their sole album on cassette tape in 2015 through Tour De Garde, the other one, the Talvi we are talking about here, apparently recorded only one demo around the same time, in 2017, but remained unreleased until recently. Forest Gloom, a small Finnish imprint, helmed by Yöpyöveli of Bronze Hall and Hourem, must have thought it was a waste to keep this demo shelfed. Even though Talvi seemed to have been put on hiatus sometime after the initial recording, we can now enjoy this wintery kind of Raw Black Metal that was hidden by time and dust for about a decade.
While the artwork and the logo in particular might have you expecting some Ildjarn-worship on this self-titled demo, there’s a little more to dissect here. Ildjarn for sure left its mark on the music of Talvi, but the six tracks on ‘Talvi’ sounds slightly more organic and atmospheric. The overall ruggedness of Ildjarn’s visionary work is found in the production and the distorted vocals, but the guitars have much more of a natural tone and above all it’s the melodicism and slightly more dynamic arrangements that gives Talvi enough of a identity of its own.
On a track like ‘Lumen Peitossa’, for example, the sole members of Talvi, Magus Olaus (also in Houre, Kaikkivaltia, and Routaterä), shows his ability to lower the speed and venture into rather melancholic territories. The lingering melody reminds me of earlier Drowning The Light material, basically from the early 2010’s and fitting the time frame of the inception of ‘Talvi’.
But, regardless where Magus Olaus got his inspiration from, Ildjarn and Drowning The Light or not, the mix of the stripped back kind of Raw Black Metal and the sombre riffs and melodies make for a great result and indeed well worth of releasing. It’s just a shame that ‘Talvi’ never received a follow-up, let’s just hope that Magus Olaus gets some more inspiration from having this first demo tape released.
