Wilt – Ruin (Review)

Wilt are a Canadian black metal band and this is their second album.

Wilt’s 2015 debut album Moving Monoliths was a very well-crafted exploration of atmospheric black metal with doom influences.

Ruin has the same overall style, but rather than consisting of three long songs, (and an outro), Wilt’s new album is carved up into mostly smaller tracks, but is no less effective because of this. In fact, the band have focused their delivery on Ruin, producing dark, melancholy music that’s full of emotive negativity and dripping with sorrow.

Like their first album, Ruin stops short of really entering depressive black metal territories, (although it certainly tests the waters), and instead concentrates on mixing doom and some post-metal resplendence into its epic, Cascadian-styled black metal. The end result is a wide-ranging and expansive blackened sound.

This is an album of rich colour and vibrant melody, but not in a ‘melodic black metal’ way. The melodies employed in these songs are just one tool in Wilt’s considerable toolbox, but they’re an important one that drives the emotive potency of the music.

I really enjoyed their work previous to this album, but Wilt have definitely further refined their songwriting and performances on Ruin. This is an accomplished and extremely enjoyable work of blackened negativity, one which has a strong emotive presence that effortlessly draws the listener in. Alongside a strong production that allows the music the freedom to breathe and move as it needs to, this is a very satisfying and enjoyable album.