Krvna -'Sempinfernus' album announcement

It was but the early days of autumn 2021 when the mysterious entity of KRVNA emerged from its vampyric slumber and released its debut demo, Long Forgotten Relic, via SEANCE. With merely two tracks, here did KRVNA paint a cursed canvas of sublime vampyric black metal rooted in the craggiest corners of the '90s. An auspicious first start, but something was truly stirring...

Indeed, it takes black-leathery winged flight with KRVNA's debut full-length, Sempinfernus. Immersive and magickal, redolent of the glorious past yet evincing a character that's timeless and transportative, Sempinfernus is black metal mysticism at its very finest. The soundfield that maestro Krvna Vatra erects is sumptuous beyond compare - its hues of richest purple, its touch velvety as it swirls around one's spirit. His songwriting cruises and crests and cruises some more, its passages employed with expert care, each one seemingly reaching catharsis every step of the way. As such, KRVNA's iteration of idiomatic "vampyric black metal" is rooted more in intent rather than sticking to the proverbial letter; similarly, to qualify Sempinfernus as "cosmic" would also miss the point. Simply put, KRVNA here creates black metal when it was BLACK METAL - past, present, future. All is cursed...

However, central to that intent are KRVNA's lyrical themes, which are rich in depth and detail. Whereas the Long Forgotten Relic demo thematically explored the vampire mythos from the ancient world to Biblical times and the black forests and mountainous castle crypts of Balkan and Carpathian incarnations of the vampire, Sempinfernus, by sheer nature of its length, focuses on the timeless and insidious nature of the vampire and its proliferation in mythos throughout world history.

"The album is inspired by the folk stories and legends passed down through my family and countless generations," explains Krvna Vatra. "The album is conceptually sparked from a sentiment that is common amongst the village folk of where my mother’s family are from; they are Istro-Romanians, people who’d moved from Transylvania some 600 years ago to the Istrian peninsula and managed to keep their language and culture alive throughout most of the centuries. In turn, the premise is that, loosely, the advent and proliferation of utilities like electricity, street lights, modern creature comforts... 'modernity' etc, helped eradicate & dispel the concept of the 'Striga,' amongst many other superstitions - like a metaphorical 'lighting up of the dark,' so to speak. It signals a moving away from the 'old ways' - the superstitions, the witchcraft, tales of vampirism and the 'old' gods - being swept away by modernity, which, in contrast, to me is comparatively and seemingly soulless. So, this album very much was a way of harnessing the very utilities that helped diminish these superstitions and other darker aspects of 'Balkan' culture to, in fact, become a means of amplifying and drawing light to these old superstitions, once again."

Suitably grandiose, exceptionally otherworldly, dazzling and spire-like in its heights and seemingly fathomless in its depths, KRVNA's Sempinfernus is sanguineous decadence writ large and a glorious triumph for Australia's ever-fertile black metal underground

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