A two-man band from Groningen with a song named after a monastery is not what the algorithm usually hands me. The video for Nevel did anyway. Four minutes later I was on their Bandcamp page going through the back catalogue. That does not happen often.
Walg is a Dutch melodic black metal band from Groningen, formed in 2021 by composer Robert Koning and vocalist Yorick Keijzer. The band writes in Dutch, self-releases everything, and has put out six numbered albums since forming. Walg means disgust. The bio says the project was conceived “in the bleak stillness of the 2021 pandemic”, two old friends drifting back together through life’s darker turns. You can hear that origin in the music. It is melodic the way Dutch skies are: wide, grey, occasionally torn open.
VI came out on 26 June 2026. Eight tracks. Nevel opens it, and the title translates as mist, which is accurate twice over. Tremolo lines that drift in and out of focus. Koning’s clean vocals surfacing through Keijzer’s rasp like something spotted across a field at dawn. Then there is Het Klooster Van Ter Apel, a track named after the medieval monastery an hour southeast of the band’s home city. A song called 1597. This is black metal rooted in a specific patch of the Low Countries, not in an imagined Norway.
Why nobody knows them
No label. No PR machine. Dutch lyrics, which most of the metal press still treats as a barrier instead of a feature. And a work rate that ironically works against them: six albums in five years means no single release gets the eighteen-month promo cycle the industry rewards. Walg just keeps building.
Why now
Because black metal in your own language is no longer a handicap. Kanonenfieber proved it in German. Fluisteraars proved it in Dutch years ago. The audience has learned that conviction translates even when the words do not. And VI is the band’s most focused record: mixed and mastered by Merijn Middelweerd, sharper than anything a bedroom project has a right to sound.
Belgium gets most of my Low Countries attention. Fair. But two hundred kilometres north of Antwerp, Groningen is quietly producing its own voice.
Put on De Eenlonkster with headphones. Six minutes. You’ll understand.
Listen to this: VI
