Five years of silence. Then this.
Vreid dropped The Skies Turn Black in March 2026 and it hit me sideways. Not because I wasn’t expecting it. I was. But I wasn’t expecting it to sound like this.
The Windir shadow
You can’t talk about Vreid without talking about Windir. They formed in 2004 after Valfar, Windir’s frontman, died in a blizzard in the mountains of Sogn og Fjordane. That’s not a myth. That’s what happened. The remaining members picked up the pieces and became Vreid. A different band, but one that carries that weight whether they want to or not.
Most people stopped paying attention after V in 2012. That album got some press, some recognition. Then quiet. Five years between records is a long time in metal. Bands either come back hungry or come back tired. Vreid came back hungry.
The production
Here’s what caught me first. This record sounds expensive. Not in a sterile, overproduced way. In a “someone actually cared about microphone placement” way. Black metal has a long tradition of sounding like it was recorded in a washing machine. Some of it works. Darkthrone made a career out of it. But Vreid went the other direction entirely.
Every instrument has space. The guitars sit wide in the mix. The drums are tight and present without drowning everything else out. The bass. You can hear the bass. In a black metal record. That alone is worth noting.
“From These Woods” opens the album. Nearly seven minutes. It was written during a late-night session in a remote mountain cabin in Sogn og Fjordane. You can hear it. Not in some romanticised “recorded in a forest” way. In the way the song breathes. The dynamics are patient. It builds, it retreats, it builds again. The kind of composition that only happens when you’re not checking your phone.
Black metal meets rock’n’roll
Vreid have always had that rock’n’roll swagger in their black metal. “The Skies Turn Black,” the title track, is under four minutes. Fast. Direct. The riff has more in common with Motörhead than Mayhem. “A Second Death” does the same thing. Three minutes, forty-three seconds. No extended atmospheric intro. Just riff, voice, out.
But then you get “Loving the Dead.” Eight minutes and eleven seconds. The longest track on the record and the one that will stick with you the longest. It’s where the atmospheric side takes over completely. Layers of guitar that don’t fight each other. A vocal line that sits back instead of pushing forward. It’s the centrepiece of the album and it knows it.
“Kraken” is the shortest track. Under three minutes. Pure aggression. No decoration. It hits and it’s gone before you can process what just happened.
Why this matters
Eleven tracks. No filler. The sequencing is deliberate. Fast tracks break up the longer atmospheric pieces. “Chaos” at nearly seven minutes is followed by “Flammen” at four. The album breathes. It has pace. Someone thought about the listening experience, not just the individual songs.
The double LP comes with a booklet. The band pressed it on marble black vinyl. They care about the physical object. That tells you something about the kind of band this is.
Vreid are from Stavanger, not Oslo, not Bergen. They’re from the part of Norway that tourists skip. Sogn og Fjordane. Mountains, fjords, and weather that wants to kill you. That geography is in the music whether you notice it or not.
Five years. Eleven tracks. A production that proves black metal doesn’t have to sound like a broken radio to be authentic. The Skies Turn Black is the best thing Vreid has ever made. And almost nobody is talking about it.
That needs to change.
