Written By Lucien Drake
For over three decades, Hecate Enthroned have lurked within the shadowed corners of the UK extreme metal underground like some half-forgotten specter refusing to die.
Emerging from Wales in the mid-90s, the band helped shape Britain’s orchestral black metal movement with 1997’s The Slaughter of Innocence, A Requiem for the Mighty, a record that fused black metal venom, death metal aggression, and gothic atmosphere.
While trends come and go, Hecate Enthroned remained committed to their own vision of symphonic extremity: grim, theatrical, melodic, and deeply steeped in mythic atmosphere.
Now, seven years removed from Embrace of the Godless Aeon, the band return with The Corpse of a Titan, A Lament Long Buried. A towering, frostbitten descent into ancestral folklore, spectral landscapes, and blackened grandeur produced alongside Dan Abela (Akercocke, Anaal Nathrakh, Bleed From Within). This is the sound of a veteran band dragging ancient ghosts back into the firelight.
Hecate Enthroned The Corpse of a Titan review
There’s a certain kind of album that doesn’t feel like it was recorded in a studio so much as exhumed from beneath wet stone and rotting roots somewhere deep in the British wilderness.
The Corpse of a Titan, A Lament Long Buried feels exactly like that, less “new release,” more forbidden relic dragged coughing back into the moonlight after seven years underground. Hecate Enthroned sound absolutely possessed on this thing.
For years the band lived under the long, annoying shadow of the inevitable Cradle of Filth comparisons. Every symphonic black metal band from the UK got hit with that curse at some point, but Hecate Enthroned survived long enough to outlive the conversation entirely.
What remains now is a veteran band that understands atmosphere and architecture. These songs aren’t just written, they’re built like ancestral cathedrals.
From the opening ritualistic murmur of “Adar Rhiannon,” the album immediately sinks into ancient soil, Welsh myth, spectral landscapes, and grief that feels older than Christianity itself. Not folklore or “grab a Wikipedia paragraph and toss some ravens on the cover” mythology. This thing feels lived in and haunted.
Then “Spirits Stir Within Our Ancestors Tombs” arrives and the album tears open.
Joe Stamps sounds genuinely unhinged here. not in the theatrical “look at me” way modern symphonic black metal sometimes slips into, but like a man screaming through frostbite while something enormous moves in the treeline behind him.
His vocals are vicious enough to peel bark off dead trees, though at times the mix buries the actual words beneath the shriek.
Normally that’d be a bigger issue, but oddly enough it almost works in the album’s favor. The vocals become another ghost in the fog rather than a narrator standing front and center. Musically, this is where the record becomes dangerous.
A lot of bands claim to blend black metal, death metal, doom, orchestration, and folk atmosphere. Most of them sound like five tabs open at once. Hecate Enthroned actually know how to control momentum.
They know when to blast forward and when to let silence in the room for a few seconds.
“Steed of the Still Water” is a perfect example. Acoustic guitars drift through the opening like candle smoke before the song slowly mutates into something hypnotic and predatory.
The rhythm section locks into this eerie pulse that feels less like a song and more like being lured somewhere you absolutely should not follow.
Then comes “Pwca.” And this is where tourists are going to split off. Some people are going to call it too long or indulgent. I think they’re missing the point entirely. “Pwca” feels like the emotional nerve center of the album.
A sorrow-drenched instrumental that hangs over the record like funeral cloth. The piano and violin interplay is pure gothic ruin. It sounds like the soundtrack to discovering an abandoned kingdom swallowed by moss and time. It’s gorgeous. And deeply sad.
The real monster lurking here though is “Deathless in the Dryad Glade.” Easily one of the strongest tracks Hecate Enthroned have written in years.
The opening minutes crawl forward with funeral doom tension before detonating into a savage blackened assault that finally releases all the pressure the album has been building. When the blast beats hit, they feel earned.
If The Corpse of a Titan, A Lament Long Buried has a pure adrenaline spike, it’s “A Gallery of Rotting Portraits.” After the album’s slower-burning atmospheric tension, Hecate Enthroned suddenly tear the cathedral doors off the hinges with a barrage of blackened fury, blasting drums, and razorwire riffing wrapped in symphonic decay.
It’s one of the record’s most immediate and aggressive moments. Vicious enough for longtime black metal devotees while still carrying the band’s signature gothic grandeur beneath the carnage.
This album actually breathes. It trusts the listener to sit inside its atmosphere instead of waving shiny objects every ten seconds like a desperate YouTuber fighting algorithm economy.
The production deserves serious credit too. Dan Abela and the band give the record enough polish to feel massive without sanding away its fangs.
The orchestration has weight. The bass actually exists, which already puts them ahead of half the genre and the guitars retain enough grime to keep everything from collapsing into sterile symphonic mush.
At nearly an hour long, there is some fatigue in the later stretch. “The Boreal Monastery,” while solid, doesn’t quite leave the same wound as the material surrounding it.
There are moments where the album’s layered grandeur becomes almost claustrophobic, pressing inward like the walls of a sealed crypt, though whether that’s a flaw or part of the album’s immersive spell will depend entirely on the listener.
But honestly? That heaviness almost feels appropriate for a record obsessed with ancient grief, forgotten myth, and burial imagery.
This isn’t easy-listening black metal. It’s not designed for passive consumption while scrolling TikTok with one thumb and microwaving pizza rolls with the other.
The Corpse of a Titan, A Lament Long Buried demands immersion. Dim lights. Headphones. Full attention. Preferably during rain.
And in return, Hecate Enthroned deliver one of the most atmospheric and emotionally absorbing extreme metal albums the UK scene has produced in years. This isn’t a comeback, it’s a resurrection.
Hecate Enthroned didn’t just return, they dragged ancient ghosts back with them.
“If this album leaves you cold, you may already be buried beneath the crypt floor.”
The Corpse of a Titan, A Lament Long Buried releases May 29 via M-Theory Audio and can be pre-ordered now.
Metal Lair Rates The Corpse of a Titan, A Lament Long Buried by Hecate Enthroned 4.5 / 5 Devil Horns
Track Listing:
1. Adar Rhiannon
2. Spirits Stir Within Our Ancestors Tombs
3. The Arcane Golem
4. Steed of the Still Water
5. Deathless in the Dryad Glad
6. A Gallery of Rotting Portraits
7. The Boreal Monastery
8. Into a Vale of Endless Snow
Hecate Enthroned is:
JOE STAMPS – Vocals
Dylan Hughes – Bass
Nige Dennan – Guitar
Pete White – Keys
Andy Milnes – Guitar
Matt Holmes – Drums
HECATE ENTHRONED ONLINE:
About The Author:
Lucien Drake is a writer and archivist at Metal Lair, contributing across features, essays, cultural commentary, and long-form series including Deep Cuts, Road Riffs and editorial projects exploring music, memory, and resistance.
Known for treating heavy music as living history rather than nostalgia, Drake focuses on influence over canon, context over hype, and the stories that survive outside official timelines.
Read More From Lucien Drake:
The Underground Never Needed Your Approval – Only the Real Ones Survived
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