Today I’m going back to 2007 and getting out a melodic black metal album that saw a subtle yet noticeable shift in the band’s sound and a change in theme from raging about external issues to focusing inward on one’s own shortcomings.

Naglfar – Harvest

Released April 2, 2007 via Century Media Records

My Favorite Tracks – Harvest, The Darkest Road, The Mirrors Of My Soul

Naglfar were fresh off their 2005 opus Pariah, which was the second to feature Kristoffer Olivius as the band’s principal member after the departure of co-founder Jens Rydén in 2003. Olivius kept at vocal duties for this album but passed bass playing to Morgan Lie. Andreas Nilsson and Marcus Norman handled guitars, and Mattias Grahn was the drummer.

While Pariah was a bomb aimed at the corruption and rot of society’s institutions, Harvest took a different approach and explored the decay of self. The themes here are depressing, bleak and suicidal. It is truly not for the faint of heart.

The album runs 9 songs out in 45 minutes. A few versions of this release had bonus material, including a DVD with live stuff, but the core album remains the same across versions.

The album opens with Into The Black. The pace is slower here, very noticeably so compared to the past few Naglfar albums. But the slower tempo works in the song’s favor, it is a creepy dive into the mind of someone who is done with life. It sets the table well for the rest of the album. Up next is Breathe Through Me, which musically sounds more like something from the prior album. It’s a faster black metal offering that gets into personal damnation, also wrapped up in the religious symbology that Naglfar often employ.

Next is The Mirrors Of My Soul and this one is a masterpiece. It a bit faster but also quite, well, groovy. It is a look at a person’s descent into total madness, with death the only option out of it. The lyrics to this one are pure poetry – the lines “Deeper into darkness, deeper I fell – When I close my eyes I see myself burn in Hell” are just amazing work by Olivius. I’ve held this as a personal favorite Naglfar track since first listen back in 2007.

It’s now on to Odium Generis Humani, which is Latin for “hatred of the human race.” This one leaves behind the self-hatred for a minute and revisits the “fuck you all” attitude of Pariah. The blistering music matches the intensity of the misanthropic delivery.

Song five is The Darkest Road and is another brilliant work from Naglfar. This is a haunting tale of someone embracing the “dark side” of life and also the nihilistic acceptance of life having no meaning. It is not necessarily a celebration, more of a matter-of-fact statement. This song was more or less an album single, and a wise pick for one as this both leaps out in its dire message and is also quite catchy.

The Way Of The Rope comes next and, if you at first think that it’s about Sweden’s long nautical history and the importance of ropes to seafaring, well, you’d be very wrong. If you guessed that it’s a savage tale of suicide, you’d be correct. After this comes Plutonium Reveries, another callback to Pariah and the misanthropic desire to see humanity perish in nuclear war as payment for misdeeds. The hits keep coming with Feeding Moloch. Moloch was an ancient entity mentioned in Hebrew texts that accepted child sacrifices, and the narrator of the song gladly supplies Moloch with its desires.

Everything winds to the end of the road and the title track Harvest. It’s clear from the drop that something extra is up here, as most of these songs run 4 or 5 minutes but this final song gets over 7. This is a dark and majestic song that feels like the whole album was building up to. Its theme is the concept of reaping what one sows, though of course it is again from a misanthropic perspective and aimed at everyone who has wronged the song’s subject, or perhaps all of humanity. While of course quite noisy like the rest of the album, the song goes out quietly with a piano outro. It’s an effective, unsettling quiet after the past 45 minutes of pure misanthropic hatred.

Harvest was another well-regarded success for Naglfar, displaying that the band still had staying power after the loss of a primary member after 2003. The band would tour behind this effort then re-enter the studio to prepare their next album in 2012. They would then take an extended layoff, something the group is known for doing, before their most recent album in 2020.

For me this has been my favorite Naglfar album, and it’s a lofty title since I love both Sheol and Pariah. The twist on theme here and the shift in music to something more catchy put this one above the others for me. When it released in ’07 I was not in the greatest of mental states, so this was either the absolute best or worst album to get into. But it all worked out in the end, and Harvest still holds up for me all these years later.