Release Date October 2nd, 2026
Format CD/Vinyl/Digital
Genre Atmospheric Black Metal
Origin Germany
Firtan started in Lörrach in 2010, in the corner of Germany where the Black Forest runs into the Swiss and French borders, and the surroundings marked them early. German lyrics, Romantic literature and Nietzsche shaped "Urgewalt" and "Okeanos", the latter bringing them to AOP Records in 2018. "Marter" in 2022 leaned harder into the low end, "Ethos" in 2024 opened the writing to strings and acoustic instrumentation, and years of European touring turned a studio-minded outfit into a band that can play these long songs onstage without the material coming apart. "Helios" is their fifth full-length and the first one built with the violin at the centre.
Recorded in winter 2025/2026 at Klangschmiede Studio E with Markus Stock, who also mixed and mastered, "Helios" runs a little over an hour and takes the sun as its symbol for an ascent won through struggle. The lyrics deal with self-mastery in a world engineered to scatter attention. Vedic and Tarot imagery, ritual language, the body as the site of the fight. Musically it is black metal architecture with death metal mass underneath, and Klara Bachmair's acoustic and electric violin threads through almost all of it, mournful in one track, scraping against the guitars in the next in ways that stop the melodies from settling.
Analogue synths and chanted vocals fill out the middle stretches, while David Kempf's drumming stays fluid under the tempo shifts. "Kalika's Tongue" and "Solis Currus" move fast and land accurately. "Ascension" and the title track take their time and justify the length. James Dorton lends bile to "The Hierophant", an eleven-minute climb that asks for patience and repays most of it, though it does test the sequencing. Christian Höll's soprano saxophone on "Shadows Of A Dawn Unborn" is the one moment nobody sees coming. Stock's mix keeps violin and guitars separated without thinning either.
The Bathory cover "Man Of Iron" closes things quietly and sits a little outside what comes before it. Elsewhere Firtan sounds like a band with its hands on every element it needs, writing long-form extreme metal that keeps its melodies and never sands down the aggression. Ambitious, assured, occasionally over-extended.
|8.3
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