BLACK METAL DAILY’S LISTCRUSH 2022: The NATHAN HASSALL Edition

Yes, yes – we fucking know. 2022 is by now quite far away in the rear view mirror and growing smaller by the minute. Yet the power and majesty behind the finest last year’s releases is both undeniable, and always worth revisiting… thus, our LISTCRUSH 2022 CONTINUES.

And it continues in spectacular form as our Nathan Hassall (published author, poet and magazine editor) offers us an approach the likes of which has never before been seen splattered across our stained pages. A list, comprised of his most revered, resonant and replayed discoveries of 2022, cocooned within a transcendent fantasy tale woven not only of cues inspired by the themes, cover art and lyrics of each release, but also the tarot. The depth and consideration given to this presentation is in veneration of the skill and passion each artist has infused within their own work; a true mark of respect for the dark art provided to us by these masters.

As noted, a battery of technical issues and the sheer size and scope of the undertaking has already hindered the presentation of this work by several months. So, without further ado or delay, allow us to proudly present…

THE TRAVELLER’S CHRONICLES: A 2022 Black Metal Album of the Year Story

By Nathan Hassall

~

The Traveller’s Chronicles is an archetypal story of revenge and enlightenment. It corresponds to my 22 best favorite black metal albums in 2022—with lyrics, atmospheres, themes, and cover art reflected in each section. I chose 22 because it aligns with the journey through 22 Major Arcana trumps of the Tarot, each of which is reflected in each section (plus, 22 in 2022 sounded cool). 

It all starts when the Traveller realizes he’s a fool and an angel appears to him to warn him of his father’s execution. On his journey, he’s tortured by an Alchemist, is guided by angels, finds enchanted weapons, fights demons, and seeks revenge. But his real journey begs the question of which spiritual path the Traveller take—the Enlightened, or Endarkened one?

~

22. Гнёт — Кома

The Traveller sits in a near-empty tavern. Condensation drips the edge of his beer glass. Opposite him, a Mystic’s neck drips with beads—obsidian, sapphire, pearl. The candle in the lantern between them flares in her eyes. She offers him a card from her Tarot deck. He pinches one; flips it. 

The Mystic folds her arms. The Fool represents freedom, adventure; new beginnings. The Traveller gulps the last of his bitter-dark beer, crumples his hand into his pocket, and rolls a gold coin across the oak table. It falls into the Mystic’s palm. 

Watch out, the Mystic warns. She presses the coin into the middle of her forehead. Often the Fool thinks he knows more than he does. The Traveller shrugs. Masterful synth atmospherics bite into depressive guitar leads, spiking the hairs on his skin. He throws his coat on and opens the tavern door. The wind’s fingernails rake through his scalp.

~

21. Gniew – Konsylium oprawców

The Traveller mounts his horse and darts through the trees. Wind shakes the leaves like cymbals. The moonlight casts shadows onto the path, a distortion of weapons—shields, arrows, battleaxes. Halfway back, clouds converge into rainfall. He kicks his horse to greater speed. Two guitar solos crescendo as he reaches his empty house, beard glistening with tiny pearls of rain. He ropes his horse in the stable. 

The Traveller gathers seven candles in his bedroom and chants the start of a protection spell his father taught him when he was seven. Halfway through, a wind shrills through the house and snaps the flames out.

~

20. Sainte Marie des Loups — Obéissance… Jusqu’à la mort !*

A feminine presence grabs the Traveller’s chest and yanks him out of bed. Quick quick, your father’s in danger! 

He throws on his robes. Grabs his rusting sword. Mounts his horse and bolts to the city. They splash through puddles of muck. Heart thumps in his ears. At the city’s walls, the Traveller passes through statues that razor him with whispers, Better listen, young Traveller! Obedience ‘til death!

~

19. Vengeance Horde — Vengeance Horde

The Traveller arrives at the sentencing stage—his father’s neck wedged in a stock. A storm of chants thunders from the raucous crowd. An executioner—face half-cloaked in shadow, battleaxe raised—spots the Traveller. Lips curl upwards. He thuds his axe through his father’s neck. His head rolls off the stage and lands at the Traveller’s foot. The Traveller is outmuscled by the crowd, who cheer and beat their barrels and shields. Blood’s scent rusts the air.

~

18. Nocturnal Triumph — Nocturnal Triumph

After months of grief, the Traveller enters a marketplace searching for the Black Amulet of Strength. The sounds of bartering wind through the air. Children run barefoot over sand. 

A glint of light catches the Traveller’s eye, and he walks over to one tent; points at a flute with a coiled seal carved into its body. The shopkeeper tells him an older man was raving about a Being with a half-shadowed face. The other half? He says. So bright it’d steal your sight.

As he clasps the flute, the Traveller’s mind resonates with music—a thick of strings, drums thudding the sand like 10,000 anchors. The shopkeeper grabs the mouthpiece. The Flute of Revival’s not for sale. 

The music stops. A voice cannons from the sky. It’s the flute that chooses. The shopkeeper falls to his knees and rambles into prayer. The Traveller stuffs the flute in his pocket.

~

17. Serpentfyre — Baptism of Shadows

On his horse once more with the market blurring behind him, the Traveller’s mind explodes with images—a castle stretching to the clouds, a demon hurling fire into an angel’s cannoning light. 

Coming to under a clouded sky, he spots a man draped in holy ropes standing in the middle of the dirt path. The Traveller dismounts his horse, ties him around an oak tree, and steps towards the man. He hovers his right hand over the sword’s handle. 

Light circles the man’s head. I am Lord of the Old School of the Mysteries. A breeze from the west puffs his white sleeves. I hear you have my Flute. The Traveller edges closer and grips his sword’s leather handle. The robed man lifts his hands. Fool!—The Traveller scrapes his blade from its holder—You mess with a man of the Craft! He spheres his hands around each other; an expanding red orb electrics between his fingers. The Traveller drives his sword forward. 

The sword tips through the middle of the robe.

EAT MY FYRE! The man cries.

Before the blade breaks skin, the man volts his palms outwards. The blazing orb thunders the Traveller’s chest. He surges through the air and cracks his spine against a tree. 

The flute rolls from his pocket as the man walks over. Bark falls around the Traveller’s head, a canticle of static to accompany him as he loses consciousness once again.

~

16. Revenant Marquis — Milk Teeth

The Traveller awakens in a moonlit graveyard, his body swelling with bruises. He checks his pockets. Empty. He looks through the fog. A spirit stems from a grave’s dirt and swirls into the form of a woman. He tries to get up, but the pain cleaves him back down.

Facing the Traveller, the ghost catches the stream of his inhalation and enters his lung, filling his body with her presence.

A vision erupts like a clump of snow. His horse stomping through black trees. Angels. A dark tower. A light crystallizing the night sky. 

~

15. Greve — Follo afv Svavel, Lifvet Dimrida

Outside the graveyard, Traveller hobbles to an abandoned horse and cart. He lies down. The horse kickdrums down a path of dizzying melodicism—crashes through a black gate, then another. A guitar distorts the blurring landscape. The horse storms into a giant door that explodes open; hurls the Traveller onto the dirt.  A cosmic hand reaches from Beyond and drags the Traveller into the dark. 

~

14. Trolldom — I Nattens Sken

The world scrapes into a frozen landscape. Ice drip-crystals off branches. The Traveller clasps his coat and battles the elements. 

His hands drain numb as he loses his grip. Coat flails open in the wind. Cold streams his foot. Fingers stop moving. 

He struggles; shivers deeper. 

Wheeling through each successive fixture, he ends at the end of the expanding room. Lucifer appears alongside Seraphiel, who orchestrates the chanting seraphim—Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. The whole Earth is full of His glory. The 72 angels and 72 demons fire the cannons of celestial war. The Traveller goes to pick a side, but his body contorts into a sphere, endlessly orbiting between light and dark.

The cold bites his hips. Chest. Jaw.

Eventually, his head scrapes under the snow. 

The ground breaks open into a gasp of clouds. 

He falls—an endless icicle slitting the sky. 

Wind rushes through his body for hours, days, years. He closes his eyes and begs for death. 

A black amulet falls at eye level, the same velocity. He reaches out. The rope needled through the amulet wraps his arm. 

He presses his palm into the amulet, and glimpses a small etched sword. The sun breaks through the clouds. All the snow melts into rivers before the earth burns dry.

He thuds the earth… 

~

13. Scarcity — Aveilut

The Traveller awakens in a strange world of concrete terror. Greys adorn bridges and walls, which strange-painted colorful words and paintings. Colossal buildings of metal and glass scrape the air. 

He gets up in a daze of lights and bleeps. The stench of smoke. Boxes of metal with humans inside gale past him. 

White pieces from an unknown material drip from people’s ears. Little rectangular boxes in their hands flicker their faces blue. Microtones vibrate between the buildings. The Traveller waves for attention, but no one looks at him. Drumbeats pound his chest until he falls on the street.

~

12. Mons Veneris — Inversados d’Um Abismo de Podridão**

The Traveller wakes in his bedroom with the Black Amulet of Strength around his neck. 

Seventy-two black candles stretch down the left of the stone room, and 72 white candles burn on the right. He’s rolled out of bed like an endless wheel. Disharmony chars his ears. 

At each meeting of a black and a white candle stands a demon and angel. From the right, an angel links his arm and tells him to trust them, for they will show him the light. From the left, a demon grips his flesh and tells him to trust them, for they will show him the light. 

~

11. The Black Mysteries — Blessed Conjuration of Celestial Atrophy

The Traveller splashes through a portal. Slumps at the bottom step of a building. He looks up an ascent of stairs at an Ancient Temple. The sky behind necklaced with stars. 

He climbs the stairs to the entrance. Above him, carved in limestone, the words ad nigrum mysteria, with scales etched below them. He walks into the middle of the temple—gargoyles perched, columns gyrating high, moonlight filtered by stained glass into red and blue hues. 

Four Beings with black cloaks hanging off their bodies crowd him from the cardinal directions. From the East, a rupture of earth waves behind Oriens. From the West, a river swells behind Paymon. Fire helixes behind Egyn blitzing from the North. Amaymon surfs a blazing hurricane from the South. The four forces converge in the Traveller’s forehead. 

The elements explode into the dissonance of organs, growls, and thumping drums. The Traveller’s Spirit bursts from his body and lands in Judgement’s Scale of the Black Mysteries. His scale jitters, plunges to the bottom. Spears to the top. Thunder rumbles, balancing the scales.

~

10. Gleichmacher — Krankung Fall Verderben

The Demon-Beings drag the Traveller to his Black Horse and hang him upside down against the back. The Black Horse panics the dry earth to a palette of dust. The Traveller’s head bounces off the ground. A soundtrack of chaos-layered riffs clears a path through a whir of colors—reds, blues, gold. 

The horse stops at the foot of a grand wooden door of a house buried deep in the countryside. The door creaks open, and a man clasps his long white beard with one hand. Taking off his pointed blue hat, he introduces himself as The Alchemist. He unknots the rope tied around the Traveller’s ankle. 

The Alchemist’s eyes burn with bars of brilliant gold.

~

9. Kamra — Cerebral Alchemy***

The Traveller sits in the basement of the house full of equipment—beakers, pestle and mortar, half-open books yellowed everywhere. The Alchemist comes down the crumbling staircase and offers a glass. The Traveller looks at it, puzzled. His throat claws with dirt. 

It’s a healing elixir, the Alchemist says. You mortal fools call it water. 

The Traveller wraps his hand around the cool glass and presses it against a cut on his face. 

Drink up, young man. Can’t have you going thirsty.

The Traveller takes a swig. 

Hungry? The Alchemist asks and pulls an apple from his pocket.

The Traveller nods, the blood on his face cutting into and out of the light. 

The Alchemist points a long fingernail a the glass. Finish that first.

The Traveller downs the rest of the glass and reaches for the apple. The Alchemist places it in his hand. It transmutes into a black amulet. 

The room blurs. The Traveller passes out.

The Traveller opens his eyes and goes to stretch. His heart jolts as he realizes he’s inside a bubble trapped in a glass vessel. He makes out the Alchemist’s eyes through the beaker’s prisming curves, performing a blackened-death spiral. 

The Traveller cries for release, but the Alchemist out-chants his cries with a prayer. Its father is the Sun, its mother is the Moon. The Traveller struggles in his bubble, to no avail. 

The wind carried in its belly. He thrashes his body like a snake, but no strength endures him. 

The nurse is the earth. The Alchemist opens the gas lines and lights a flame beneath the vessel. 

From this shall come marvellous adaptations—cries the alchemist, as light cascades The Traveller’s mind—of which this is the method! 

The Traveller stops begging. A presence shudders his veins. 

The Light of Wisdom? 

It is completed what I had to say—The Alchemist drops the amulet into the mixture—about the operation of the sun. 

God?

The Traveller bursts into liquid.

~

8. Doldrum — The Knocking, Or the Story of the Sound that Preceded Their Disappearance****

The Traveller reappears to form in a humble cottage bedroom, closeted inside a trick of light. A question reverberates through the room, shaking the chandelier like a bone. Are you a man who knocks at the doorways of the earth? Are you a spirit of air or mud or salt? 

In a panic, the Traveller barges through door after door. With each room he enters, the house quakes into more of itself. Through the dusty light of the dining room, a portrait of two men gazing upward at the light trembles off the wall. Its glass cracks against the ground. 

The Traveller enters a kitchen. A kettle violently whistles in the air. A spirit ropes the Traveller’s neck and tenses it into a burn. A burst of laughter. The cauroselling house. The whistle blades deeper into the Traveller’s ear.

That same voice—lie down my sons of rock and rot into the pools of dawn! 

An oak tree leans from beyond and scrapes the kitchen window. 

The rope releases its grip, and the Traveller lies on the floor and mutters a prayer. 

A harmony of silence as the room lifts into light, the voice a distancing echo. The rope bursts into a snake that panics out of the room. 

The front door swings open. 

~

7. Moonlight Sorcery — Piercing Through Frozen Eternity

Outside the cottage, the Traveller meets a man with two small horns poking from his head, his face singing a deep red. 

I know where the Axe of Frozen Blasphemy is. The weapon of the Executioner. 

The horned man points towards a castle in the East, swelled with night’s deep blue-purple clouds. He offers the Traveller the rusty blade he had stolen from him by the Lord of the Old School of the Mysteries. 

Before he can ask where he found him, the figure disappears. 

Approaching a castle, the Traveller sneaks beyond the guards, climbs over a ruined wall’s spilled brick, and climbs a ladder. Stalking the walls under the moon, the Traveller is electrified by the purple cloud’s melodic current. 

His body surges through the castle. Slays beast after hungering beast with his rusted blade. He finds the tower and ascends the stairs. Slashing through the ligaments of four skeleton guards, he ascends to the top of the tower, which scrapes through the ethereal clouds into the heavens. 

He stands before a half-angelic, half-demonic being—the Executioner. 

In the open tower courtyard, the Traveller pulls out his rusted blade.

Adrenaline rushes his system. 

One swipe of the Executioner’s wing cuts through the Traveller’s armor and rusted blade, throwing him to the ground. 

The Executioner stands over him, the angelic half sparkling in the moonlight and the other half-caked in darkness. You do realize your dad was a terrible man? 

The Traveller coughs. A clot of blood splats on the brick and glints in the moonlight.

If he didn’t want this trial for you, he’d not have got caught with that Flute… You think mortals like you can withstand the piping of angels?

The Executioner readies his stance for a final blow. 

You greedy—

From the heavens, a Voice thunders and bolts the Axe of Frozen Blasphemy into the Traveller’s grasp. 

The Executioner swipes his wing. The Traveller struggles the Axe against it. 

His father appears in the clouds on top of a Black Horse. The Traveller makes eye contact, and his father’s head slips off its shoulders. 

Every muscle in his body tenses the strength of 10,000 heavens. 

The head drops around him. Then, thousands of heads drop from the clouds and thud around them like clumps of rain. 

The Executioner bursts into laughter, steps away from the embrace, and fashions a thunderbolt. He throws it, and it erupts on the ground as the Traveller rolls out of the way and onto his feet.

The Traveller pulls back the axe and swipes vertically through the Executioner’s cloak, carving the blade through the middle of the being. Revealed is a being of half-red shadow, half-light. The red-half puffs into dust. The sky’s purple is rushed with gold, and the light half of the being ascends. 

The Traveller drops to his knees.

~

6. Crîssäegrîm — Ethêrea

The Traveller turns into a star inside a snow globe. A spell of pure winter magick plucks at his memory in the sphere of glass crusting with snow. Riffs fall softly around him before an avalanche bundles his body toward a forest.

~

5. Verminous Knight — Malignant Descent

O magisterial raw coldness! The moon rusts into a fog of synth. The Traveller transmutes into a darkening flower that waves high in the forest. Flakes of ice scratch the air on their way to earth.

~

4. Vihameditaatio — Metafyysinen Käsitys Itsestä

Wracked with hunger, the Traveller picks a red-brown mushroom jeweled with white stars. He chews the bitter, earthen body. After walking through the trees dappled in light, the forest turns into stained glass—tree by tree, he moves past shards into luminous greens and purples. 

He reaches a stump marked with the blade of an axe. His psyche gently cracks open.

At the end of the forest, he reaches a field of grass, each blade hosting drops of dew that splint the moon. Upon crouching and standing back up, an extraterrestrial presence contorts into view, wearing a scarf of light around its shoulders. It offers a book, which the Traveller tries to grasp, but he drops it on the dirt. He gets on his knees, claws through the dirt, and buries the book. 

The book leaves into the Traveller’s father.

Son, he says. 

The entity boards a ship and poles a light at the Traveller. 

It’s time to rest.

~

3. Gevurah — Gehinnom

A Great Light spirit-cones the Traveller deep into the enveloping folds of darkness. Stars vortex in the distance, swapping places with the infinity of each other. 

I must thunder down the paths I chose.

His body corkscrews unrelentingly, abdominal muscles vining over the liver, animal flesh blood-wrung inside this meteor of bone. 

My mind is a chalice of blood. Oh, have mercy.

On the universe’s horizon, the wound of the Black Sun half-silts on the ocean. It charges its dark rays at the Traveller. They, like an inverted candle flicker, dance in his eyes.

All I am, all I’ve been searching for, all this was for what?

He slowly unravels like a scroll. Darkness robes his body like silence.

Your Presence. I feel it ravening through my veins.

Mars a red eye that pendulums through space—it thumps off the earth like a drum. Riffs reverberate through the dark, glaze off Saturn’s rings. 

May Peace be my War! May War be my Peace!

A throne gold-spirals into view. 

Almighty Sephirot, grant me the Power of Powers. Share with me the secrets of your Flesh Temple!

Judgment—wearing the form of an angel—splits past him and slats him into firewood. 

May I burn for 10,000 eternities.

Fragments of his body collide with the throne. The Traveller explodes into a Great Fire, burns with the presence of the Almighty Nameless, the Unspeakable, the Aching Whisper…

I Am. I Am. I Am. 

~

2. Merihem — Incendiary Darkness

The Flute of Resurrection floats in the occult of space and wind-drags the Traveller through the infernal realms of the Qlipoth. Consciousness blazes sphere by sphere as the matter that makes him divides and descends into Spirit. 

Incense floods the pitch black as the Traveller slows his breathing into a meditative trance. His mind is a corridor of obsidian scales; each hallway thickens with the goldening-red Luciferian gnosis—illumination swells in his veins.

~

1. Trolldom — Av Gudars Ätt…

The Traveller awakens on his feet, planted on the ground earth. The crystal stars spellbound above him. Everything slows the pace of a dream. 

The whole universe above is a piping of majestic riffs that ribbon around the thunder of drums.

A spell of rivers curves down a wind-shuddered mountain—the rushing water bleeding into a colossal wave of darkness that crashes from the East. 

They smash the Traveller onto a stage.

A crowd with shadow-lit faces chants at him. 

The Traveller stands, and the Axe of Frozen Blasphemy appears in the grip of his hands.

In the Name of Me, a voice says. Forgive. 

He looks down, his father’s neck inside a stock, the Black Amulet a pendulum curving the air.  

It is the completion of your work. 

A tear drops from the Traveller’s face onto his dad’s wrinkling scalp. 

There is no other way. 

He tries to fight the force pressing on the axe. 

Kill me, my Son, for you must become! 

His father’s face turns, burns iron-red. The Traveller scans the crowd and sees himself amongst them.

Break the cycle!! 

He carves the air and lands a blow against his father’s neck.

The Traveller—I must break it. I must... 

His body explodes into a Key of Light.

~

Notes

* ‘obedience… until death’ is a translation of the album title from French to English

**The Italics in this passage is what the Seraphim chant. From https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/things-you-didnt-know-about-seraphim.html

*** All italics after the word ‘prayer’ in this passage are quoted from a translation of the Emerald Tablet found in
Brain Cotnoir, Practical Alchemy: A Guide to the Great Work, (2021), Weister Books, p.43.

**** The italics in this passage are littered with lyrics quoted from Doldrum—which are also my ‘black metal lyrics of the year,’ presented in italics. Sourced from the Metal Archives. 

~

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