Since releasing 2006's now-classic Diadem of 12 Stars, Olympia, Washington's Wolves in the Throne Room, led by brothers Nathan and Aaron Weaver, have continually thwarted expectations. They release new music only when they have something genuinely new to offer. They experiment with textures, instrumentation, and vocals, sometimes radically as on Celestite, the electronic ambient companion to 2011's Celestial Lineage. In the four-year gap between 2017's Thrice Woven and Primordial Arcana, they built their own Owl Lodge Studios to record their first "self-contained" album; it was written, recorded, produced, and mixed by the trio -- WITTR has also made singer and guitarist Kody Keyworth a full contributing writer and production partner. The only other participants here are guest bassist Galen Baudhuin (Infera Bruo) and multi-instrumentalist Yianna Bekris, of one-woman black metal project Vouna, who contributes to two tracks. Musically, Primordial Arcana sits dead center between the texturally expansive Celestial Lineage and the Cascadian black metal of Thrice Woven. There are ingloriously buzzing guitars, blastbeats, melodic pianos, hovering synths, growling vocals, truly symphonic atmospherics, and field recordings. The album meets the band's criteria for presenting the dramatic alongside the dynamic, yet exceeds them both with its most sophisticated set of melodies.

1		Mountain Magick
2		Spirit of Lightning
3		Through Eternal Fields
4		Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire)
5		Underworld Aurora
6		Masters of Rain and Storm
7		Eostre
8		Skyclad Passage

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