If the public is to be believed, vast numbers of people come to music as a means of escape from everyday life’s pressures and demands. It’s a mode of transport, a ticket to ride to an elsewhere of pleasure and consolation. Crossing the titular “bridge” into the music on this new LP from LVTHN won’t lift you into any sublime atmospheres, blithely removed from struggle and strife. Quite the opposite: the Belgian band plays a kind of black metal well fitted to the textures and intensities of walking around the post-industrial West in 2025. Filthy, excoriating, ill intended — the music on The Devil’s Bridge is thrilling and unpleasant in equal measure. It’s not an easily consumable bit of contemporary content. But indirectly, The Devil’s Bridge raises some interesting questions, among them: In the face of so much evil, how should art respond?
If the dudes (mostly, not exclusively, but mostly) who make trve kvlt black metal are to be believed, self-regarding contempt for popular public standards of pleasurable art is as compulsory as knowing how to work a tremolo chord. The most irritating of those dudes profess membership in an “aristocracy” (an unhappy word some black metal bands and listeners have fixed upon) of putatively “elevated” knowledge and sensibility, and the humans around them who linger in various forms of ignorance or cultural peasanthood deserve their fates. Whatever.
LVTHN may not share those reactionary attitudes, but it should be noted that the first two tracks on The Devil’s Bridge constitute a song suite, “A Malignant Encounter,” subsections of which are titled “The Servant” and “The Master.” This reviewer would like to associate the titular “malignancy” with the exploitative politics implied by those social roles — but who knows. It could be another conventional (and sort of exhausted) revisiting of fealty to Satan. For sure, principal influences on LVTHN’s sound are or were deeply traditional in their attachment to continental and Scandi Satanic black metal: Katharsis, Craft and Aosoth loom large in LVTHN’s tones and rhythms.
Aesthetically that’s good news (and additionally it’s hard to summon a more righteous trajectory through black metal and work in the social world than the one executed by Katharsis’s Drakh, AKA Dr Axel Salkheiser, a researcher at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena). The best songs on The Devil’s Bridge, “Sum Quod Eris” and “Grim Vengeance,” are muscular and direct, more raw and dirty than angular or icy. The degree of Satanic fanaticism informing the ostensible cruelty, and the precise ways that Satanism might issue in a more worldly politics, wending its way toward us through the songs — these things are unclear. The Devil’s Bridge comprises 44 minutes of compelling black metal, but it’s hard to say where it’s going. Perhaps in this sense, more than any other, that makes it hard music for hard times. Welcome to them.
