Icelandic band NYIÞ are not particularly forthcoming when it comes to publicity. Very little is known about them, and you often need to look to other artists to get even the barest amount of information about them, but it’s clear that – inside Iceland and beyond – they have a small but dedicated group of admiring fans. Nor have they just come along as a new project, as they already have a long history of recording and performance. What’s at least sort of clear is this: they seem on the surface to be a good fit with the metal genre, and they have some touring history with metal bands, but they’re little to do with that genre at all.
Given their album artwork, their song and album titles and their stage set-ups (right down to their interest in the occult and ritual), you’d be forgiven for expecting something between Sun O))) and Dragged into Sunlight – which isn’t the worst comparison, actually, but NYIÞ is far more about ambient, malevolent soundscapes and what I’d have to shrug and eventually refer to as ‘post rock’. If that has piqued your interest at all, then you could do worse than to spend a few minutes looking at some live footage of the band, captured last year. The skulls on the mike stand and the concealed faces look familiar, but the sound is less so.
Recently released on France’s Cyclic Law label, the keyboard-taxing “᛬ᚢᛁᛋᚿᛁ•ᚼᛆᛏᛁ•ᚼᚱᛅ᛬” is in fact a compilation of the band’s earlier releases, here brought together with some additions. Linking these together, we are told, is the use of ‘curse poetry’, a literary tradition which goes back through thousands of years of history. The band has either repurposed existing texts to make these additions, or looked to historical precedent (a grimoire dating to the 1600s is one such source). There is some slight sense of the ‘joins’ in the album perhaps, given that it brings different projects together, but overall it works very well, with the opening track ‘Decompose’ (also the only track title in English) setting the tone: slow, impressive, often pleasantly dissonant. There’s no clamour of guitars, rather a deliberate track which begins to add in the wide array of instruments used on the album. Orchestral sections run throughout, and the use of strings on Angurboði is genuinely very beautiful.
By the time Fjörbrot plays, it feels as though this is the closest we’re going to get to anything conventionally ‘guitar band’ in nature, though the song feels like a continuation of the palpable menace of Til eru hræ, with its sinister vocal burr. (Of course, what is spoken on the album is in Icelandic, though non-Icelandic speakers will still catch the sense, or at least the tone.) By the time we get to Rót (‘Root’) and Iða (‘Maelstrom’), the final two tracks, it does feel as though we have come full circle; there’s certainly ‘magic in the web of it’ when you consider the album as a whole.
“᛬ᚢᛁᛋᚿᛁ•ᚼᛆᛏᛁ•ᚼᚱᛅ᛬” is a heavy, ominous album, very expansive by its nature – but it works well, and is certain to reward further listening. Full of slow gravity, it takes an interesting premise, explores it in an unconventional manner and delivers a crisp-sounding, atmospheric and hypnotic release (Cyclic Law are past masters at working with bands who eschew convention in their music, and they have done excellent work here). Of course, it won’t be for everyone, but none of the really interesting stuff ever is.
“᛬ᚢᛁᛋᚿᛁ•ᚼᛆᛏᛁ•ᚼᚱᛅ᛬” is available now via Bandcamp.