WWIII – CD-71168 339.97MB FLAC
The single wide scan used here makes the 2001 edition feel less like a conventional album cover than an opened reliquary. On the right, a figure armed with blades steps away from a writhing mass of serpentine bodies in an image taken from Gustave Doré; on the left, the songs appear over a murky architectural interior, surrounded by small portraits of the band and repeated occult geometry. The design is considerably different from the crowded monochrome battle scene used for the scarce 1998 Gothic Records edition. WWIII was not merely putting an old recording back into circulation. It was giving the album another visual life, one that exchanged underground Scandinavian murk for the grand, theatrical antiquity of a nineteenth-century engraving. Even the title acquires an accidental second identity: the Swedish måne, meaning “moon,” appears on the cover as Mane, the ring over the å removed. Beneath an ice-cold troll moon becomes, through typography and international circulation, something slightly estranged from its own language.
Under iskall trollmåne is the debut album that arrived after its successor. Thy Primordial recorded it in 1995 and expected Gothic Records to release it in February 1996, but the label delayed it for approximately three years. Rather than wait for permission to have a career, the band recorded more music, signed with Pulverised Records and released Where Only the Seasons Mark the Paths of Time in 1997. When Gothic finally issued Under iskall trollmåne in August 1998 as a hand-numbered CD limited to 1,000 copies, listeners were receiving the band’s beginning after already hearing where that beginning had led. WWIII’s remastered 2001 edition complicated the chronology one more time. By then Thy Primordial had released several increasingly precise and technically forceful albums, making these raw 1995 sessions sound not merely old but archaeological. This post correctly identifies the artifact through the WWIII catalog number CD-71168: it is not simply “the 1995 album,” nor merely the elusive 1998 pressing, but the American reintroduction of a record already displaced inside its own history.
That displacement is present within the album itself. Tracks one through six were recorded and mixed at ABF:s Studio in June 1995, with drummer Morth handling the engineering and mixing. The final three tracks were made earlier, during February and March at Hypersonic Studio in Mjölby, with Patrik Jonsson recording and mixing. Those closing songs came from the band’s first demo, De mörka makters alla, issued while they were still using the shorter name Primordial. The finished album therefore moves backward as it progresses. Its newest recordings come first, while its oldest material waits at the end, like a buried foundation exposed after the building above it has been explored. That construction helps explain why the sound changes subtly during the final stretch. It is not simply uneven production. The listener is crossing the seam between two sessions and entering the band’s earliest preserved state.
“Mitt sökandes ritual” is a remarkable way to begin. At nearly nine minutes, it refuses the nervous efficiency associated with many first recordings and instead establishes the record through patience, repetition and gradual acceleration. Slower guitar figures create a ceremonial entrance before the band surges into faster passages, with the two guitars working less as rhythm and lead than as layers of moving weather. The production is thin compared with the greater separation and power of Where Only the Seasons Mark the Paths of Time, but thinness is not absence. It exposes the construction. Bass notes, pick attack, cymbal wash and small changes in the tremolo patterns remain audible because there is no enormous wall of studio mass covering them. Isidor’s voice is already severe, an abrasive rasp that sounds embedded in the room rather than theatrically suspended above the instruments. Morth’s drumming can be ferocious, but the music is not imprisoned inside continuous blasting. Its strongest passages are built from the tension between velocity and the slower, almost processional material that keeps returning beneath it.
Thy Primordial are usually placed within Swedish black metal, but this album reveals how porous that classification was. The precision, icy guitar tone and melodic motion belong to the Swedish environment that also produced Dissection, Dawn, Marduk and Dark Funeral, yet the atmosphere frequently leans toward the earlier Norwegian model: elongated repetition, raw spatial production and riffs intended to induce a state rather than merely display compositional skill. The melodies are already memorable, but they are not offered as heroic resolutions. They circle, descend and reopen the wound. “Den ondes klor” carries its title, “the claws of the evil one,” through music that repeatedly seems to seize and release the listener. The title track does not turn trolls or moonlight into folk-metal pageantry. Its landscape is older, emptier and less domesticated. The “troll moon” is not a cartoon creature in the sky but a sign that the familiar world has entered another jurisdiction.
The Swedish titles intensify that private geography: “Blodsgräs” evokes blood grass, “De viskande trädens skog” the forest of whispering trees, and “Bortom nattsvart himmel” a place beyond the night-black sky. These are not simply interchangeable declarations of darkness. Together they create a landscape in which natural things have become witnesses, conspirators or entrances. Trees whisper, grass holds blood, the sky becomes a barrier that might be crossed. “Bortom nattsvart himmel” is especially effective because the bass rises more clearly through the mix while the fast melodic guitars seem to widen the song rather than merely increase its aggression. The record’s language and sound are doing the same work: taking tangible objects and pulling them toward an unseen world. Even without keyboards, acoustic interludes or decorative folk instruments, the album creates a sense of ancient terrain through guitar intervals, repetition and pacing.
The final three songs reveal the rougher skeleton beneath Thy Primordial’s later identity. “De mörka makters alla,” “The Impression of War” and “Mörkrets fäste” originated on the 1995 demo, although “Mörkrets fäste” had originally appeared there under the English title “Dancing in Blood.” Their inclusion does more than fill out the running time. They preserve the moment when the group was separating itself from its earlier death-metal background and discovering what its version of black metal could become. The transitions are more abrupt, the performance less polished, and the guitar solos in the latter portion of the album can arrive with a surprisingly direct heavy-metal character. Rather than weakening the atmosphere, these moments reveal that black metal had not yet hardened into a single approved vocabulary. Melody, blast beats, raw production, traditional soloing and remnants of death metal could still coexist without needing to be reconciled into a marketable subgenre.
The 2001 remaster by Rick Plester does not conceal those origins. It places a frame around them. There is an important difference between restoration and modernization: a useful reissue should allow an old recording to speak more clearly without forcing it to pretend that it was made later. This edition retains the narrow, abrasive dimensions of the sessions while giving the instruments enough definition to expose the band’s early arrangement choices. The result may sound less massive than Thy Primordial’s subsequent records, but its limitations are inseparable from its character. One can hear five musicians solving problems in real time: how long a riff can remain hypnotic before it must change, how melody can survive violent drumming, how a bass line can quietly redirect a song, and how a Swedish band can absorb the Norwegian second wave without becoming a replica of it.
Under iskall trollmåne should not be treated merely as the primitive draft of the album reviewed immediately beside it. Its delayed appearance made it stranger and, in some ways, more revealing. Where Only the Seasons Mark the Paths of Time introduced Thy Primordial as a fully operating force; this record exposes the workshops underneath that force, including the earlier demo, the two studios, the uncertain contract and the years when the album existed without reaching its intended audience. Its history demonstrates how underground music can refuse a clean timeline. A record may be composed first, released third, remastered later, repackaged beneath unrelated artwork and finally encounter many of its listeners decades after the band has disappeared. Here it arrives once more as a large FLAC archive beneath an unfolded scan, carrying every stage of that journey at once. Anyone who owns the hand-numbered Gothic pressing, the WWIII edition, or another reissue may hear meaningful differences in mastering and presentation. Those impressions would add another layer to an album that has always reached the world by delayed and circuitous routes.
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