Band info
Band: Karhunvartijan Tyhjiö
Album: ‘The Shameful Light‘
Released: December 4th, 2025
Genre: raw black metal
Location: Finland
Review
Hello, hello. This is ABMN in what we are already calling a Shameful Light Friday honoring today’s submission. Starring for a third time the Finns KARHUNVARTIJAN TYHJIÖ, which this time bring us which is their first full-length after a handful of demos, EPs and single releases.
Titled ‘The Shameful Light’ and released on December 2025, this album strikes following the release of “Ruttovirta”, the album’s advance single which we covered. In a similar artistic path, the band keep their raw black metal roots and leave a door open to sprouting influences to folk resources entangled in between as part of their pagan and mythic Finnish ethos, hinted by the name of the project itself, and evoking what the band intends to channel as reverence to nature with their own flavor of contemporary gloom and existentialism (for instance, depression) and historical cues.
In the case of ‘The Shameful Light’, through a signature blend of instruments among all central and invited artists (including work with synths, arrangements and lyrical content), we’ve got in this spirit a frantic yet solemn work, when not furiously crude as expressed in the vocal work of both main and chorus singing, wiring to punk withing their sonic influence and shape here. The album speaks on historical strikes to fascism (and from to itself) such as “Operation Valkyrie”, bringing paganism on the table in a compatible wavelength to modern anti-fascism as noteworthy artists have done before, like Panopticon or Crown of Asteria, in a way that it can hint to popular (and cultural) resistance to any form of dominance, not necessarily through restoration of any abstract and romanticized Old Times or Old Ways, but with memory and open rejection in today’s context, exemplified through the album.
Other links and platforms:
BC: https://karhunvartijantyhjio.bandcamp.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/karhunvartijantyhjio/