Release Date 25.09.2026
Format CD/LP/Digital
Genre Black Metal
Origin Germany
Nail By Nail comes from Karlsruhe in southwestern Germany. Guitarist Tobias Rühl and vocalist Phil Heckel started the band in 2023, and Lars Hägele on second guitar, Emmanuel Breite on bass and Noel Auch on drums joined soon after. There were no demos, no split tapes and no EP. The band went straight to a full length, and "Embraced By Darkness" came out through War Anthem Records in May 2025. It was fast, aggressive black metal with a death metal edge and a melodic, haunting streak. Barely sixteen months later the same label puts out the follow up.
"Internal Inferno" runs a little over forty minutes and wears its Watain and Marduk colours on its sleeve. "Katharsis" and "Blades Ov Perdition" come straight out of the Swedish blasting school, with tremolo storms over Noel Auch's relentless double kick. "Above The Black Tower" and "The Valley Of Sorrow" slow the pace and open into wide, epic melodies, the sign of a band chasing something grander than speed alone.
The sound is bigger and colder than on the debut. The guitars of Rühl and Hägele have a frosty, serrated edge, Breite's bass rumbles under the blasts, and the drums thunder through "Into The Dragons Mouth". The master is pushed hot, and by the last third the cymbals start to tire the ear. Heckel spits hoarse, bloodthirsty fury over everything with little variation, and when the arrangements turn majestic that one colour wears thin.
The twists are the gamble here. The sudden gear change in "Ride The Beast" jolts the track awake, while the one in "Into The Dragons Mouth" breaks the momentum and the track does not win it back. The running order climbs from the blasting fury of "Katharsis" to the mournful march of "The Valley Of Sorrow", and that arc holds the album together. This is a vicious second album from a band with fire in its lungs and Swedish blood in its veins, more ambitious than the debut and a few steps short of a sound that belongs only to Nail By Nail.
|8.5
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