Band: Skuggor
Album: The Expanse
Genre: Black Metal
Country: Australian
Label: Nordvis Productions
Released: September 4th, 2026
Introduction
Australian solo Atmospheric Black Metal project Skuggor, the work of Matthew Bell, returns with his fourth full-length, "The Expanse". Across six tracks, the album moves between aggression and contemplation, combining harsh black metal vocals and guitars with strings, ambience and slower, more melancholic passages.
The result is an album that feels less interested in constant brutality and more focused on building an atmosphere, sometimes even letting that atmosphere take over completely.
The Expanse
Tracklist:
- The Expanse
- The Fire
- The Trance
- Hem
- The Storm
- The Nothing
The album kicks off with the title track "The Expanse", a hypnotic ambience that drags on, until the guitars come in and then the vocals, bringing aggression to what was until now a peaceful scenery. The dissonant guitars near the end also are a highlight for me, perfectly in sync with the drumming underneath, simple yet powerful.
The second song, The Fire, comes with a slower tempo, marked drums and vocals that express more agony than aggression, with at times a beautiful set of strings that go under the vocals. I also got some Summoning vibes from a bit that is purely instrumental, with the tremolo guitars, the strings and drums, bringing me back to that feeling on the Oath Bound album. The Trance, the next song, brings the strings again but this time, above guitars that are just setting a distorted base for it. It’s a slower, contemplative song that the vocals command: up until a point, vocals are filled with agony, tiredness, to then become more aggressive, filled with anger, with hatred. The drums go with it, with the cymbals being as prominent as ever, to culminate in a huge wall of sound that then, comes back to the contemplative feeling of first. Needless to say, an absolute gem for those who love atmospheric black metal, and my favourite of the album.
Then we get Hem, a track that brings a totally different vibe in the beginning, which felt to me like sitting watching someone alone playing the piano, a simple melody that once the song really kicks in, is transferred to the ambience and strings, still perfectly recognisable , but now under the drums and guitars. This song feels classical and sort of like a movie or game score, like an atmospheric black metal composition for a Castlevania game, and it’s a huge compliment; to me, songs that erode feelings, memories and references like this one are why the atmospheric black metal genre is so vast and creative, and one of my favourite subgenres.
Once The Storm starts the feeling of familiarity hits hard; the tremolo guitars, the simple drums, the shrieks and some ambience underneath. The breaks here also brought me back to Summoning and such, with the thundering floor tom. The Storm is the more black metal song on the album, but with beautiful contemplative moments in between.
The last song, The Nothing, starts with a melody that sticks with us. The guitars here are again, more of a base, and this song has my favourite vocals of the whole album, the shrieks drenched in emotion. It’s a perfect ending, a song that feels like a conclusion. A painful one, if we take into consideration how the vocals sound near the end; a mix of pain and hatred, that then brings us to the same combination of the intro: the melody and the icy sounds below it, that go on until the album ends.
Conclusion:
The album is great. The order the tracks are arranged feels great, the mix of aggression and contemplation is on point and more importantly, the elements we see in the compositions are always doing something for the song, it’s never random, nor something that feels like “ok the artist just wanted to add X instrument here”, but more of a thought and conscious choice.
It’s an awesome find for those who are looking for new atmospheric black metal to listen to, and for the ones that already know Skuggor or the other projects of Matthew like Forlorn Citadel, it’s yet another beautiful album by him.
BZM Rating: 8.5/10
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