Metal
Self-released · 25 September 2026
The album opens with “Welcome to Limgrave”, a minute and a half of acoustic guitar and no distortion at all. Limgrave is the first region of Elden Ring, the meadow you walk out into when the game has barely started, and the rest of the record follows the same rule: ten tracks and ten names from the game, one apiece: five bosses, two places and three other moments. It is a choice you hear in every song, because most of them set up an enemy, fight it and finish it off within their own four or five minutes. None of them gets past 5:47.
Noctule is Serena Cherry on her own. For more than a decade she was lead guitarist and one of the two voices in Svalbard, the Bristol band that announced the end in May 2025 and played its last show at ArcTanGent in August. The project’s first album, Wretched Abyss (2021), was written in lockdown out of Skyrim; this one changes game, changes register and comes out self-released, with no label in the middle. Cherry has put it in those terms herself: the freedom of not having to negotiate anything with anyone.
The material is by-the-book melodeath run through symphonic black metal. “Lord of Blood” (3:57), the first single, out on 14 July and built around Mohg, lays a Gothenburg-school guitar melody over a galloping riff. “Goddess of Rot” (4:40), released on 11 August, was the second. The symphonic side arrives as gothic piano and strings, and Cherry’s voice hisses more than it shouts — a long way from the clean-and-harsh trade-offs Svalbard worked with. “Grafted” (5:11) and “Lament of The Omen King” (5:47), the two longest tracks, are where the imaginary band sounds biggest, and “Hallowhorn Grounds” (5:28) closes on a full orchestral passage.
The connective work, though, is left to the two short pieces. “O’ Death” runs 1:02 and serves as an interlude; with the minute and a half of “Welcome to Limgrave” they add up to the two and a half minutes that give the whole thing the shape of a journey. The album is thirty-nine minutes long and the remaining eight tracks all sit between 3:14 and 5:47, a short stretch for a record that presents itself as a crossing.
Eight songs that all sit between 3:14 and 5:47, each sealed off in itself, make a catalogue before they make a journey: the record piles up encounters without any one of them conditioning the next, and when “Hallowhorn Grounds” arrives the ending carries weight because it is last, not because anything has led there. The emotional freight Cherry describes in interviews — she says the game helped her out of a very bad stretch — is information the album leaves outside itself and entrusts to whoever reads about it; inside there is only a bestiary. And the vocabulary is borrowed top to bottom: the melodies are Gothenburg’s and the blastbeats with keyboards behind them are Emperor’s and Dimmu Borgir’s, played with a fluency that makes it hard to point at the part of this record nobody else could have signed.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Roger Estivill