VIA DOLORIS - GUERRE ET PAIX

Via Doloris, the project of ex-Satyricon guitarist Gildas Le Pape gives us an answer on their debut album Guerre et Paix. Instead of treating guitars as texture, Via Doloris positions the melody front and centre while keeping the drifting, modal DNA of black metal. The guitars sit confidently at the front of the mix, allowing tremolo-picked lines and minor-key progressions to unfold with unusual clarity. That choice becomes the defining character of the album, but it's not the only mode the record operates in.

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Songs like “For the Glory” drift into melodic phrasing that feels folk-adjacent, while “Un Franc Soleil” finds another register altogether. The drums are reduced to a simple bass snare beat, with guitars sustaining single notes over full bars, delay bleeding each section into the next. The effect is a drifting, meditative sway. Even when the intensity increases, the bass drum only picks up to eighth notes, giving the impression of escalation without breaking the sway. The sustain lingers long after the song ends.

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That ear for restraint is highlighted again when the melodic focus drops away entirely. On "Visdommens Vei I" the rhythm section carries a momentum that doesn't need melodic intensity to hold attention, and “Ultime Tourment” opens on a sharp, military style snare pattern, the guitars shifting from melody into droney, dissonant textures. Occasional fills and quick footwork remind you this is still a black metal album.

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Behind the kit is Frost, one of the most technically accomplished drummers in Norwegian black metal. A long-time collaborator from Le Pape's Satyricon years, his contribution to the record is unmistakable. Most importantly, he controls the album’s energy, shifting between frenzied blasts and simple patterns. The blasts are surgical, the transitions razor-sharp, and when the music demands it, he locks into a groove and holds it with the kind of tension a programmed track simply couldn't replicate. 

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That rhythmic control gives the guitars room to do something interesting. Notes often bleed into one another, sustain pooling into a continuous voice rather than a sequence of discrete phrases. Combine that with Frost's locked grooves and the repetition that runs through the compositions, and the album builds something genuinely hypnotic — not in the passive, ambient sense, but it pulls you in before you realise, and it refuses to let go.

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With seven tracks and a forty-eight-minute run time, this is a debut album built on considerable craft and a clear understanding of what melody can do inside black metal's architecture. But whether that's enough to distinguish Via Doloris from the broader black metal landscape is a question the next record will have to answer. 

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SCORE 8/10

REVIEWED BY RYAN LIND