SERPENT LORD – The Once Forgotten Ways Of Old

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• Bands:
  SERPENT LORD
• Duration: 00:38:54
• Available from: 06/29/2026
• Label:

• Eisenwald Tonschmiede

Debut album for the US Serpent Lord, yet another creation by multi-instrumentalist Jake Superchi, the mind behind numerous projects that have emerged from the stars and stripes black metal underground over the last thirty years.
“The Once Forgotten Ways Of Old” is a work composed of six pieces, for almost forty minutes of melodic and pagan-inspired black metal, with strong references to the nineties and an aura imbued with epic nature. The full-length is produced by the German Eisenwald, with which Superchi carries on a long-lasting collaboration, given that even the best-known projects Uada and Ceremonial Castings are released under the same record company.

The birth of Serpent Lord dates back to 2003, when Superchi released, within a year, a split with his other creation Mysticism Black and two demos under this moniker. Then a break of over twenty years, and now the return to the scene with “The Once Forgotten Ways Of Old”, which faithfully follows the basic idea of ​​a melodic black metal, conceived as a sort of mixture of Dissection and Mgla, but also more, as we will explain shortly.
Serpent Lord (Superchi's stage name) plays all the instruments and sings, demonstrating both excellent technical mastery and compositional creativity, and the ability to alternate screaming, growling and clean vocals. The scheme of the six long pieces is quite canonical in balancing more aggressive sections with slower and more meditative moments; all, however, always characterized by a hegemonic melodic sensitivity, leading from beginning to end.

The opening piece “Aries Ram” is one of the best on the album both for the hypnotic sense of the tremolo riffs and for the brutality of the blast-beats, embellished with a series of accents on deep and majestic timpani, capable of creating a solemn and martial setting. We like the succession of voices between screaming and a deeper and more catacomb-like part, reminding us of the first Cradle Of Filth, while the drums are hyper-dynamic and full of interesting orchestrations, intertwining double bass drums, drums and cuts on the cymbals with extreme fluidity in the harmonies of the six strings.
The acoustic passages also have a leading role, as in the central part of “Costrictor”, in the folk finale of “Enter Serpentagram” and in the final “Forever On The Grounds Of Battle”, the latter pervaded by an almost medieval feel.
With the title track we find ourselves in a grandiose war march, in which the rhythmic beat of the percussion accompanies us for over four minutes along a magnetic pagan ritual which, thanks to the epic choirs, recalls a more graceful version of the sound of the more Viking productions of Bathory and Graveland; everything then explodes in a further four minutes of continuous interlocking with the blacker side of Serpent Lord, who in terms of gradations and harmonic nuances are very reminiscent of Dawn from “Slaughtersun (Crown of the Triarchy)”.
“A Pagan's Spell” also uses percussive inserts with monumental and combative tones, subsequently moving into the classic territories of an ultra-harmonizing black metal à la Windir, but at the same time also devoted to speed, especially when trying to follow the Immortal pattern of “At The Heart Of Winter”.

The overall result is therefore a fusion of pagan/Viking melodies and airs, which in the long run turns out to be a little lacking in substance, precisely because too much attention is paid to a plot that is too pompous and pretentious in an unconditional search for solemnity and musicality.
For those who are thirsty for black metal with a lot of melody and excessive grandiloquence, the Serpent Lord project combines Windir, Dawn and Dissection with the more viking and pagan side of Bathory, plus some very slight folk hints.
For everyone else, however, “The Once Forgotten Ways Of Old” could prove to be a work that is far too complicated to assimilate, especially for lovers of the raw and traditional scene or for those looking for the dirtiest, coldest and most instinctive angles of nineties black metal, because at times Superchi's guitar really borders too much on melodic solutions which, in the long run, risk being extremely cloying.