Ashbringer – Subglacial
Release Date: 13th February 2026
Label: Bölverk Collective
Bandcamp
Genre: Atmospheric Black Metal
FFO: Panopticon, Eneferens, Fen, Falls of Rauros.
Review By: Aeons Burning
Ashbringer is a band that I’m not terribly familiar with, but I came onto them with their 2023 record We Came Here to Grieve. Honestly, I was pretty underwhelmed. The genuinely atrocious cleans on the record really didn’t leave me with a great first impression of the band and I didn’t really have any inkling on coming back to them. That was until one of my closest online friends told me that Absolution, their 2019 record, was peak, so I made sure to give it a listen. She wasn’t wrong, because Absolution was awesome, and gave me that sense of beautiful melancholy I look for in this style of atmospheric black metal. I then saw Subglacial in the promo bin, and naturally I didn’t have the highest expectations. I normally don’t listen to singles at all before an album’s release, so I didn’t know what I was getting into. I’m quite pleased to say that Subglacial is a strong course correction from We Came Here to Grieve, and this is what the follow-up to Absolution should have been all along.
One of the things Ashbringer does very well is they seamlessly incorporate folk music elements in their atmospheric black metal, not unlike Panopticon. Acoustic guitar is a common element across Subglacial, and the solos are all huge standouts, each being bluesy and easy to just vibe with. Subglacial as a whole is a very pretty record, combining the beautiful acoustic parts and leads with some absolutely ferocious emotionally-charged black metal. Fleeing into Portals is the highlight for me, with the first half of the song being a build-up that gets progressively more dramatic until around the halfway point it explodes into a blackened assault before a bluesy solo takes it until the end. This song rocks, and I’ve listened to it more times than anything else on this record. This is the style of atmoblack I enjoy, and not once throughout Subglacial do Ashbringer bring back the cleans from We Came Here to Grieve, which is the biggest triumph here.
I love when a band course-corrects itself. Ashbringer needed to do so desperately, and Subglacial is a fantastic return to the sound I craved after listening to Absolution. There haven’t been many atmospheric black metal releases from this year so far (at least, not ones that I’ve listened to), but Subglacial will be pivotal on any fan of this oft-maligned subgenre’s radar. This is also a very digestible record, coming in at just under 40 minutes, and my only hope is that Ashbringer continues on this path moving forward, because this is very good stuff.
(3.5 / 5)
