Watain are a black metal band. They have tried to make that clear by including the word “dark” in the names of two albums, Lawless Darkness and Sworn to the Dark, and by sneaking it onto the cover of their latest album, the title of which sounds like the result of a game of black metal Mad Libs, if not the first thing spit out by one of those online genre-specific name generators. In case their blackened metalness went over your head, you can also dig up 1998’s Go Fuck Your Jewish “God” EP, 1999’s The Essence of Black Purity, and 2013’s Fuck Off, We Murder flexi-disc for clarity.
It stands to reason that TRIDENT WOLF ECLIPSE would then be a black metal record. It is. Specifically, it is a second-wave black metal record. On it, you will find all those old Mayhem, Darkthrone, and Marduk riffs you forgot about but loved to jam to in the early days of your black metal phase, shrink-wrapped in better production than any of those bands wanted or were able to afford when they recorded them. They may not be quite as “necro” as they were in the mid-nineties, but Watain preserve the tremolo and blastbeating so well it’s almost as if the twenty intervening years didn’t happen, or as if the band is willfully ignoring anything that changed in that time, just as they did in 2010, 2007, and on back to their inception. They are not alone. Plenty of newer artists can be classified as “throwback” bands, adopting retro attitudes on-stage and in their songwriting as a way of tapping into or recapturing a zeitgeist they were not able to experience firsthand, or that went all too quickly. Like those artists, Watain can occasionally be worth a listen. There’s nothing wrong with croaking along to lyrics about Satan and war and wolves and other things that are dark; after a point, it just wears thin, and experimentation becomes not only desirable, but necessary.
Watain know this. The Wild Hunt, while not a particularly great record, dared to peek beyond the mossy, frostbitten confines of second-wave black metal at what their less nostalgia-hampered peers were doing, and then mimicked some of what they heard. “They Rode On” is a mold-breaker within Watain’s body of work, making use of decidedly non-blackened sounds like folksy acoustic guitar and male and female singing to craft nine minutes of Watain at their yearnful best. While it’s easy to sniff out the influence Bathory’s Viking phase had on the song, the point stands: Watain know that they can experiment, and that they can be successful at it. That’s what makes TRIDENT WOLF ECLIPSE such a problem. On first listen, it’s frustrating to hear Watain not only regress to sub-Sworn to the Dark/Lawless Darkness-isms, but to do it consciously, as if afraid of where the inspiration of The Wild Hunt might have taken them, both creatively and in the eyes of their permanently backwards-facing fanbase.
Subsequent listens evoke almost nothing. Because there isn’t anything inherently wrong with playing and listening for nostalgia, it’s possible to latch onto a passage here and there and enjoy it “for what it is”: for what it reminds you of, rather than what it bodes. There’s a high for every low. The lows are derivative. The highs are adequate. On the whole, TRIDENT WOLF ECLIPSE averages out to a perfectly flat, perfectly neutral listen that can eat up forty minutes of your night in exactly the same way that staring at your collection of old black metal bands will.
-Brian L.
It stands to reason that TRIDENT WOLF ECLIPSE would then be a black metal record. It is. Specifically, it is a second-wave black metal record. On it, you will find all those old Mayhem, Darkthrone, and Marduk riffs you forgot about but loved to jam to in the early days of your black metal phase, shrink-wrapped in better production than any of those bands wanted or were able to afford when they recorded them. They may not be quite as “necro” as they were in the mid-nineties, but Watain preserve the tremolo and blastbeating so well it’s almost as if the twenty intervening years didn’t happen, or as if the band is willfully ignoring anything that changed in that time, just as they did in 2010, 2007, and on back to their inception. They are not alone. Plenty of newer artists can be classified as “throwback” bands, adopting retro attitudes on-stage and in their songwriting as a way of tapping into or recapturing a zeitgeist they were not able to experience firsthand, or that went all too quickly. Like those artists, Watain can occasionally be worth a listen. There’s nothing wrong with croaking along to lyrics about Satan and war and wolves and other things that are dark; after a point, it just wears thin, and experimentation becomes not only desirable, but necessary.
Watain know this. The Wild Hunt, while not a particularly great record, dared to peek beyond the mossy, frostbitten confines of second-wave black metal at what their less nostalgia-hampered peers were doing, and then mimicked some of what they heard. “They Rode On” is a mold-breaker within Watain’s body of work, making use of decidedly non-blackened sounds like folksy acoustic guitar and male and female singing to craft nine minutes of Watain at their yearnful best. While it’s easy to sniff out the influence Bathory’s Viking phase had on the song, the point stands: Watain know that they can experiment, and that they can be successful at it. That’s what makes TRIDENT WOLF ECLIPSE such a problem. On first listen, it’s frustrating to hear Watain not only regress to sub-Sworn to the Dark/Lawless Darkness-isms, but to do it consciously, as if afraid of where the inspiration of The Wild Hunt might have taken them, both creatively and in the eyes of their permanently backwards-facing fanbase.
Subsequent listens evoke almost nothing. Because there isn’t anything inherently wrong with playing and listening for nostalgia, it’s possible to latch onto a passage here and there and enjoy it “for what it is”: for what it reminds you of, rather than what it bodes. There’s a high for every low. The lows are derivative. The highs are adequate. On the whole, TRIDENT WOLF ECLIPSE averages out to a perfectly flat, perfectly neutral listen that can eat up forty minutes of your night in exactly the same way that staring at your collection of old black metal bands will.
-Brian L.
Archival details
- Original URL
- https://metallifestyle.weebly.com/metal-lifestyle/review-watain-trident-wolf-eclipse
- Recovery source
- live-weebly
- Recovery date
- 2026-07-22
- Stewardship polish
- 2026-07-22
- Preservation status
- restored
- Missing assets
- None recorded
Preserved by Bloodsoaked Media · The Archives