Norwegian black metal band Mayhem released a new album titled “Liturgy of Death” on Feb. 6.  The album contains only eight tracks, but each is over five minutes long. It is the band’s seventh studio album. The album is a solid, traditional black metal album. Pretty much exactly what you’d expect from Mayhem. It’s not bad by any means, but it just sounds similar to all of their other music.

Their first album “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas” was incredible and is considered by many to be one of the greatest black metal albums of all time. However, it seems to me that the band is trying to stick to their guns rather than branch out creatively, which I can respect, but it makes for a pretty boring discography in the end.

Again, this album is not bad; I actually enjoyed it a decent amount. Mayhem’s classic deep, dark, guttural guitars and colorful and expressive vocals never truly get old. My issue with it is that you could literally play me a song from any other Mayhem album, and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. The lack of creativity is truly the only aspect preventing me from enjoying this album a lot more than I did. Regardless, my personal favorite tracks from this album are “Despair” and “The Sentence of Absolution.”

The band’s lineup has changed significantly since its formation in 1984.  The current lineup features Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud on bass and vocals, Jan Axel “Hellhammer” Blomberg on drums, Atilla Csihar on vocals, Morten Bergeton “Teloch” Iversen and Charles “Guhl” Hedger on guitar.  The album, for the most part, is pretty slow-paced, which is typical of black metal albums. Despite this, the album was exciting at some points with cool guitar riffs, solos the band’s signature expressive vocals.

I wish that they would try out more musical elements. Acoustics or synths would be my preference because that would be an interesting addition to the black metal sound. The production is also very well crafted, but honestly, if you ask me, I miss the old Mayhem’s intentionally bad production. It definitely was not bad but not what I expected at all after listening to all of their older albums.

Overall, “The Liturgy of Death” is a solid black metal album with some boring moments but some fun ones as well. If asked to rank the album on the traditional five-point scale, I would give it a solid three. You can stream it on all major music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music.