REVIEWED: Dark Clouds Over Camden VI @ The Black Heart, London (Day 2)

From grisly, ritualistic artefacts and intricately rendered occult artwork to specialist record stores and whole volumes dedicated to documenting black metal’s rich, delectably sinister sonic legacy, it’s hard to imagine a subgenre of music more deeply entrenched in culture and tradition than this notoriously frostbitten variant of extreme music. And with a full two days chock-full of DJ sets, album playbacks, live artist interviews and an expansive bill of artists spanning underground talent sourced from pretty much every bitingly visceral, eerily transporting and folk-steeped corner of this icily magnetic movement, London black metal weekender Dark Clouds Over Camden makes for an exceptionally tantalising proposition.

With Camden extreme music hotspot Raven Records having recently wrapped up their darkly absorbing repertoire of various artist interviews and special events, a leisurely stroll across the road to The Black Heart finds this favoured live music haunt packed to the proverbial rafters with a host of blistering and icily immersive attractions. From primal, murkily pulverising episodes of frantically careening warp speed to sumptuous layerings of sleekly unfurling fretwork and sweepingly expansive acoustic arrangements, tonight’s genre-twisting repertoire of live music speaks volumes for the tradition-steeped yet ever-evolving shape of black metal circa 2026.

Among the numerous, ghoulishly arresting highlights with which both the Friday and Saturday of the fest are liberally peppered, Italian atmospheric black metallers NEL BUIO are an instantly magnetic proposition, their lethally caustic yet finely sculpted, serpentine grooves pulling us in with rapid, viciously energised magnetism. With keenly discernible roots in altogether more atmosphere-driven stylistic territories, theirs is a sound abundant in intelligently layered and hauntingly evocative songwriting. Amassing nightmarish, blackly enveloping enormity via luxuriantly expansive swathes of synths that whirl and dissipate into the ether like restless spirits from the beyond, the Italians showcase seamless ease in pairing the atmospheric dynamics of their sound with classic, second wave-era carnage. Together with an array of gnarly, sleekly elongated fretwork whose whirling, serpentine throes abound with tangible malevolence and impeccably taut execution, Nel Buio embody all the searing hostility and black-hearted atmosphere that makes this subgenre so extraordinarily compelling.

After an inordinately lengthy soundcheck spent tussling with some evidently pretty problematic technical hitches, folk-steeped English black metal collective OLD CORPSE ROAD finally set about unleashing their ferocious and ornately enveloping craft. Alas, it’s not exactly plain sailing from here on out, with their lung-rupturing vocal dynamics sitting a tad too high in the mix and subsequently swamping the more airy and elegantly nuanced facets of their sumptuously layered sound. Pesky sound gremlins aside, however, there’s no mistaking the compositional ingenuity and synapse-scorching intensity that resides here in blackly enveloping abundance.

With its intensely cinematic lashings of Hammer Horror-esque spoken word theatrics, icily entrancing atmospheres and frantically writhing layer upon layer of fluidly cascading organ notes, ‘The Whispers of Long Meg’ is lavishly bestrewn with epic, ‘Cruelty and the Beast'-era instrumentation. Propelled forth into ever-increasingly unhinged extremes of sound barrier-shattering acceleration by a slew of hellfire-scorched banshee shrieks and stratospheric lashings of orchestral trappings, ‘Hag of the Mist’ comprises a particularly compelling blend of sumptuously gothic atmosphere and synapse-scorching sonic extremity. Laden with a bristling multiplicity of knife-edged tremolo that spills forth in a veritable blizzard of densely enveloping, wintry hostility, the compositional intricacy and searing aggression seen here tonight in generously layered and intoxicating abundance makes for an eerily absorbing spectacle.

Imploding headlong into a savagely engulfing tsunami of blastbeat-stricken warp speed and visceral grooves sizeable enough to shift the fabric of the universe itself, Polish black metal horde BLACK ALTAR don’t so much enter the stage as utterly detonate it from the inside out. Bedecked in a ghoulish array of ink-black robes and a charnel house-sized selection of human skulls, these instinctual yet tautly calculating aggressors purvey a sound firmly entrenched in the decay and arson-stricken carnage of the iconic second wave while simultaneously evoking an aura of melancholia quite unique to their own inimitably configured design.

Shifting, with razor-keen coherence, between ragged, throat-cauterising screams, tangibly chilling dissonant riffing and starkly percussive expanses of towering, militaristic enormity, theirs is a calibre of darkness deep enough to drown in. Indeed, the unrestrained ferocity and nihilistic presence that hovers around this morbibly compelling entity like lingering plumes of cemetery fog is as decimating in scale as it is liberally drenched in fathomlessly sinister, ink-black magnetism. Suffice to say this latest, thoroughly blackened instalment of Dark Clouds Over Camden is by far the most supremely sinister and immersive edition we’ve yet to witness.