GRØND, chapter two in a trilogy, is an album wholly developed through a process of withering abstraction. The instrumentation renders a forceful merging of massive celestial bodies, each a whirling cacophony of inter-dimensional conjuring. After digesting the lyrics in accordance, what used to sound like the swinging of a pendulum, rather depicts a birth of an unknowable origin… a spectral and magnetic void. NIHILL, an outfit firmly entrenched in the European underground, travels freely from one metal sub-genre to the next, effectively dispensing with the notion of a genre specific work all together.
The reflexive nature with which Nihill makes these connections puts them beyond the boundaries of simple categorization. GRØND is at once: black metal, drone, doom, noise, and even hints at martial industrialism; arriving at something resembling mechanistic dark ambient as much as traditional black metal. If this unique work need suffer comparison for the sake of cognition, Nihill‘s nearest contemporaries are the likes of Blut Aus Nord, Deathspell Omega and the more obtuse of America’s own Leviathan.
Moreover, rather than confining the moods and ideas therein to the nullifying constructs of a conventional metal record, GRØND offers the listener the opportunity to perceive things beyond physicality, an experience closer to metaphysical awakening than base entertainment. Into the void indeed….
