Power will have another day. — Simply titling their tenth full-length album ‘How It Ends‘ sent many a wild-eyed fan of north-of-Dublin, Ireland-borne pagan metal act Primordial dropping the teet from their mouths and asking if it was really over. We’re not necessarily building a case for the stupefaction of the masses by way of reactivity here but this age-sans-nuance and failing cognition en masse surely cannot last no matter how enfeebled the polis being to appear. Nobody believes there will be any real call to action for doomed mankind anymore, ‘placation by any words necessary’ is all that is left of politico anymore and its tech-aided efficacy is ages proven. In some direct sense the aforementioned tenth album deals less with how it’ll all come crashing down but who will be heroic in taking the first-and-final steps away from peak corporate domestication. Our protagonists will gladly die for a hopeless cause, meeting imminent mortality head-on and acting with a level of perseverance likewise reflected in the band’s charged lifespan beyond the norm. Willing to full-body their cause and burn alive in the process of ensuring liberty, we can admire the martyr-level passion of purpose their traditional heavy metallic roam and yarn takes as this well-respected entity once again feeds the mind another book-length, impassioned epic at world’s end.

Primordial technically began back in 1991 as a path beyond the stinking corpse of extreme thrash, one that’d taken deep interest in black metal’s evolution beyond the mid-80’s (Bathory, Samael) as well as the gothic extreme doom motions out of northern England where the inspiration from early My Dying Bride (and nearby) alongside the surreal depth of early Katatonia seemed to contribute to the gloomy disharmony of their first demo tape (‘Dark Romanticism…‘, 1993) which’d been notable not only for its unique sort of miserable dramatism but the over the top spoken and harsh vocal performances. Describing the place and time (eh, the early 90’s) when the early discography of this band was something undiscovered and wild might seem odd today, especially since their first three full-lengths are readily available in their second or third revised remasters and the history of the band is well celebrated but I’d at least suggest the immersion available to ‘Imrama‘ (1995) always offered an unreal realm of its own where the heavy metal rooted glow of pagan black metal wasn’t readily on offer outside of the equally obscure Norwegian choices per the first Kampfar mLP and Hades‘ ‘…Again Shall Be.’ Here in the states maybe you’d seen some buzz in a photo rag, maybe live photos in a zine but it’d been a few years before the free-flowing descriptors like ‘Celtic/black’ and ‘folk/black’ metal designations made sense from there. With increasing popularity gazing upon the broad spectrum of their work over the years we’ve come to simply call their style pagan metal but really, the style is entirely their own.

From album number one ’til this tenth the gist is that Primordial‘s vocalist honed his presence and the whole band aimed for a depth of songcraft which was never behind the curve, big songs to match big personalities which’d in turn carried quite big heavy metal albums. It might’ve been their second album that’d served as the personal breakthrough for the band terms of what direction their style ultimately took but it was signing to Hammerheart Records for their popular third LP (‘Spirit the Earth Aflame‘, 2000) that’d caught wider traction by the mid-2000’s when they’d hooked everyone’s ear with their impassioned fifth album and first for Metal Blade. It’d been a breakthrough which I’d reminisced about about back in 2018 when reviewing the success that ‘Exile Amongst the Ruins‘ (2018) had been, eventually placing it at #8 on my 50 Best Albums of the Year. Some would say they’ve made the same sort of album since 2005, but the invested fan knows better in terms of sourcing the abundant nuance of each given recording.

They don’t make these every year then, eh. — The dramatic, ‘epic’ pagan metal we find here and throughout the past is of their own machination, an original act without any particularly serious peer since the late 2000’s and they’ve somehow made this happen without becoming a hacked-at ‘brand’. For the sake of my own perspective, I’d classify this group as especially proven and long threatening in the hall of all-time favorites, a better-with-each-release sort of situation but without any major discrimination between any of their records. Each release from the band has their knots, their points of burl and struggle. Even at this point, three plus decades and now a full ten-count of LP’s in the resume Primordial‘s work remains impossible to replicate, not only for the personae expressed but for the idiosyncratic evolution presented thus far. Some might even say Primordial‘ve over-reached for far too long, each of their albums having been enormous hourlong epics from the start, and this album might’ve finally struck upon the follies of said excess gusto. That said, as a longtime fan you’re more than likely feeling entirely secure heading into ‘How It Ends‘, knowing exactly what you’re in for on a basal level while curious what unique tonal angle/perspective persists here.

Well, they’re still leaning into the folken trod of epic heavy metal sized pieces, hitting the ~6-7 minute mark on average while reaching not-so-gently back in time for some shades of auld black metal nausea to tinge their battlefield scenery (see: “We Shall Not Serve”, etc.) with just enough edge to suggest that an ancient spark persists. One could argue they’d been more bold with this on the previous two records in some sense but I’d submit that this record’s mood of determination, rise into furor, and vainglorious death has its sights on epic/heavy weighted and a few folken Celtic rock leaning pieces overall (“Traidisiunta”, “Call to Cernunnos”). The opener/title track (“How It Ends”) builds this case with its first handful of notes, a riff as much as it is a motif in the steady-handed melody it produces to start before harmonizing the rest of the knotty phrase into view mid-song. Opting to return to producer Chris Fielding, whom the band’d notably worked with on ‘To the Nameless Dead‘ (2007), the warmth of the previous release has been traded for open night air with crisply set yet room-resonant percussion and a somehow no longer boxed in A.A. who’d always shown up for the opening number better than most; The other half of Side A, “Ploughs to Rust, Swords to Dust” notably pulls from a bit of lyrics Averill had mentioned way back in 2021 on his podcast (Ep. 77 or thereabouts) and pulling off what I’d say is one of the better songs to drop from Primordial‘s hands and mouths in some time, at the very least they’ve set the album on fire between those first 2-3 pieces.

From there Side B on this double LP both shines and trails off in thought as “We Shall Not Serve” continues to uphold the momentum of their best work and single “Pilgrimage to the World’s End” presents its own onward dangling limbo of a reveal which… never quite arrives. I’d figured the feeling of the song was thematic in its intent but this’d been the point of necessary patience in my experience, the song just kinda hangs out. The streaks of black metal guitar work in “We Shall Not Serve” and the tension of “Nothing New Under the Sun” soon after begin to feel like key points getting in the way of the sort of heavy rock influenced side of the band as it reveals, the tone of the full listen begins to shift its tectonics wildly in 6-8 minute chunks and loses me a bit; It’d taken some time to understand the Virus-esque creep-rock direction of “All Against All”, much less the steady ride of “Death Holy Death”, wherein the reference points for these black n’ roll departures escaped me at every turn. There is an “Emerald” at the end to finish things off, sure, she’s a beaut but no doubt many folks will hit that second spinner and feel like the hour is soon getting long, the drugs are kicking in, and things are getting weird. That won’t save ’em from rousing folk-rocking closer “Victory Has 1000 Fathers, Defeat is an Orphan” easily one of the more energetic pieces on the album beyond “Ploughs to Rust, Swords to Dust” and the opener but still related to the heavy rock motions made on the second plate.

Gauging from years of interviews and discussions of their gig Primordial‘s method is a matter of showing up and hashing it out, nothing so deeply premeditated in terms of completeness and the greater shape of each record in terms of the writing process. In the past they’ve been squarely on the same page despite splitting the songcraft in diagonal sections but this might’ve been too haphazard for an album as ambitious as ‘How it Ends‘, where it doesn’t seem they’ve reached consensus as to whether they’re leaning into revolutionary rock kicks or following up with a shade darker-than ‘Exile Amongst the Ruins‘ and in truth they’ve certainly done both, see-sawing in such a way that the full listen is uneven but no less of an ‘epic’ than one’d expect. It’d taken a while to warm to, and there are a couple of songs that still do nothing for the tone of the record, but there is come coexistence among these armies as I’d ultimately found myself keen to the unexpected and newly arisen traits that’d found their way into this landmark tenth record. A high recommendation.

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