Artist: Thornhammer
Country: Bulgaria
Label: Hellvetic Carnage Productions
Formats: Demo Tape
Year: 2026
Although I wasn’t entirely sure, of course, I was fairly certain that Thornhammer was yet another offshoot of Todorac. Bulgarian Raw Black Metal isn’t something I run into every day, and when I do, this chap is almost always involved in some way or another. The same goes for Thornhammer. Here we find him behind the drum kit, which perhaps means he can’t leave quite as strong a mark on the music, yet Thornhammer undeniably springs from the same wellspring of ideas and views on how Black Metal ought to sound.
In fact, Thornhammer is a continuation of the now defunct Löwenblut, which released a rehearsal tape in 2025 – one which I unfortunately missed and for which there is therefore no review on these pages. Whether this is simply a name change or an entirely different band with exactly the same line-up, I do not know. Todorac is, after all, well known for frequently changing his mind and for starting and then disbanding bands and labels, so we can just leave that open for now. The music, however, is of the same standard as most of what has come out of this extremely small Bulgarian scene in recent years.
Like virtually all the bands and projects associated with this group of musicians, Thornhammer is also rooted in the style of black metal that was most prevalent towards the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s. At the time, it was most commonly described as ‘Hateful Black Metal’ or ‘Misanthropic Black Metal’ – terms that are, in fact, based on the emotional tone of the music. It is Black Metal stripped back to its very essence: simple, cold riffs in a minimal ‘production’. The sense of total revulsion towards modern society, a kind of deep-rooted nihilism, oozes from every pore here. The raw and unpolished production of this debut demo exudes the same kind of malevolent energy as many bands from those bygone years, now well over twenty-five years ago. If, like me, you harbour a certain nostalgia for those years when many underground bands sought the musical opposite of Cradle Of Filth and Dimmu Borgir, then this debut demo by Thornhammer is for you.
