NECHT (CAN): Brand New Weird Black Metal Sermon!

If you don't look at the release date – May 17, 2024 – you could almost think you've bought a vintage stock copy of a Scandinavian second-wave black metal classic from the mid to late nineties. The brand new – and final – single from NECHT’s album The Prophecy of Karnifor perfectly reinforces this impression in every respect.
And yet with Stirred By Shadow, I Did Wake, things are somehow different, as between the three rather idiosyncratic pillars of anthem, frenzy and ritualistic mantra, Canada's NECHT have created a quite serious temple that fulfills an admirable and rare purpose: to enable transformation. And no, this does not imply self-transcendence within the framework of a cult, including the one presented here. Instead, it's actually all about feeding the often tragic stories from the outside world into a self-contained narrative universe of their own. NECHT see storytelling – well beyond religion and the fetish of the bygone, as seems all too native to black metal – as the most salutary way to digest the emotional excess and the manifold sensations of a world that is all too expansive for the single mind.

NECHT approach this undertaking with pragmatic efficiency: They play through everything on the basis of the idea of a lost, quasi prehistoric civilization and work their way through it. If you get involved, you will encounter influences from Greek mythology as well as from other early advanced civilizations of mankind.
Using the methods of H.P. Lovecraft's Weird Fiction, the band creates ancient writings as well as their discoverers, translators and resulting interpretive works. Ultimately, Zenith Maharg and his Ascendants consistently embody their own work in flesh and blood – and thus create a wonderfully rebellious black metal that makes you revel in its archaic grace, while respectfully thumbing its nose at the very scene it serves, but also at religious nutcases, warmongers and other excesses of humanity.
With the now available sermon Stirred By Shadow, I Did Wake, the band tells of the origin of the sun god B'Ahn, who opposes his mother, the all-devouring Karnifor, in order to ward off the apocalypse – behold:

“BRETHREN! Do not fear the shadow. Within the shadow there may be found despair. Within the shadow there may be found death, and dissolution. But within the shadow, there may also be found awakening and enlightenment. For it was in the shadow that our Father, B’ahn, was born. GLORY TO THE SUN!”

Zenith Maharg from the Temple of NECHT in the Cult of B'Ahn,
citing the Enkari-B'Ahn writings

Meditation through repetition: Put Stirred By Shadow, I Did Wake on your alt prehistorical playlist now as an offering to B’ahn: https://linktr.ee/nechtblackmetal

NECHT's full length meditation The Prophecy Of Karnifor will be revealed on May 17, 2024:

https://necht.bandcamp.com/album/the-prophecy-of-karnifor