Year: 2026
Label: Century Media

Seven years ago, Norwegian black metal pioneers Mayhem released their sixth studio album, Daemon (review). The album saw them abandon the decidedly progressive and experimental territory they’d explored on previous albums Esoteric Warfare (2014) and Ordo Ad Chao (2007), and create an album that by and large pretended like the last 25 years hadn’t happened. Qualitatively, a good choice… but as far as artistic ambition goes, it felt like Mayhem had decided to play it safe by returning to iconic debut album De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’ (1994) blueprint.

Somewhat surprisingly, in revisiting Mayhem’s entire discography last year, Daemon turned out to not have stood the test of time so well. What upon release was, lack of artistic ambition considered, a primarily positive surprise, tasted now rather stale and uninspiring. Certainly less engaging than 2004’s Chimera, which I disliked very much upon release but now turned out to be unexpectedly strong.

Liturgy Of Death follows close in the heels of Daemon stylistically. It’s perhaps a bit less obviously a throwback to DMDS, but overall the sound is highly similar. Hellhammer’s furious pounding behind the drum kit, the discordant and furiously sawing riffs guitars of Mort Bergeton Iversen (who on Daemon still went with Teloch) and Ghul, and Attila Csihar’s theatralic, dramatic vocalizations. And, of course, Necrobutcher on bass and perhaps, most importantly, as sole original member, giving some legitimacy to the name. It all sounds very familiar when put next to its predecessor.

Of course, there’s a case to be made for playing it safe and moderating experimentation. In comparison to aforementioned Esoteric Warfare and Ordo Ad Chao, two albums so abysmal one can barely listen to them, there’s no doubt which is the winning formula.

The problem with Liturgy Of Death is that it doesn’t contain any highlights or standout tracks. Absolutely nothing memorable, except for the bongos towards the end of The Sentence Of Absolution. Daemon had quite a few interesting tracks on it, but Liturgy Of Death is a rather samey pulp of discordant riffs over which Attila growls, grunts and howls.

Liturgy Of Death is perfectly serviceable and painless to listen to. But it’s also dangerously close to black metal muzak in how generic, nondescript and run-of-the-mill it is. On Liturgy Of Death, Mayhem come more across as a generic copycat band than the genuine article – I’m convinced there’s a better Mayhem-soundalike album released in the last half decade than this.

I’m not sure I’d say I’m disappointed in how Liturgy Of Death turned out, especially after revisiting Mayhem’s discography and discovering how tepid Daemon sounded now. Why expect more from its successor? The advance singles also prepared me for this: all of them were fine in form, but scarcely convincing in substance. And that’s entirely accurate for the entire album as well.

As background music, Liturgy Of Death can at times come really close to coming across as good. But as soon as one perks up and starts paying attention, it becomes painfully obvious that there’s nothing really to pay attention to here. Liturgy Of Death is adequate, confident – but also utterly, absolutely an uninspired routine performance.

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