vote
7.0
- Bands:
VINTREGAL - Duration: 00:27:19
- Available from: 05/29/2026
- Label:
-
ATMF
Streaming not yet available.
Just stating that Vintregal are a black metal band from Ukraine would help us to place their sound in a specific musical sector, in a certain type of mood, in a very specific sound, and in fact by pressing 'play' on this debut EP of the Eastern European band, “Towards The Last Dawn” (for convenience we will not use Cyrillic characters in the body of this review), the sound placement falls within the expectations we had envisaged.
The five songs (less than half an hour of music) consist in fact of a melancholic and dark black, capable of bringing to mind names such as Hate Forest or Drudkh.
The perception is that this is a work strongly rooted culturally in its land: “Towards The Last Dawn” is aggressive but elegant in its own way, within its violence it maintains slowdowns, changes in tempo, without delegating everything to a furious blast-beat (which is also not lacking), and operating a lot with melody and epicness, thanks also to the inclusion of keyboards to underline some more martial moments.
The guitars draw structures that embroider over the sound carpet, where monolithic riffs perform a structural function at the service of the six strings capable of closing the various passages with a strongly melodic touch, also very Nineties.
The result is a nostalgic but gritty album, with some beautiful ramifications and an excellent 'black', aseptic voice, which goes well with the sense of deadly sadness that accompanies the songs, albeit exquisitely and traditionally black metal. In fact, there is no shortage of moments that willingly look at the origins of a certain Scandinavian black, with almost folk inflections in some sections (“Steadfastness!”) and epic sections, as in “And The Land Stands!” (rather evocative title for a Ukrainian band in this historical moment) or “Wolf's Heart”.
In any case, originality is not the strong point of this debut album: the album is rather classic and in some cases it is easy to understand the construction of the song, with the result that for the entire duration of this debut we are almost never surprised.
In short, we are talking about an honest black album, very melodic and, although quite derivative, still pleasant to listen to. Let's see which path ours will take in the future.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
