Metal Debate Album Review - Helvegr (Tsjuder)

The Great Metal Debate Podcast

Welcome back metal heads to another episode of The Great Metal Debate podcast. It's Xander once again with another album review. Today I will be looking at the Gr1m and kvlt Norwegian black metal band called ... Tiss-juder? Nah, I'm just joking. The bands name is pronounced like "Shoo-der" And this is their 6th full-length studio album titled Helvegr. This kreig outing was released on June 23rd through Season of Mist records. I feel like the best way to describe this band would be like what would happen if a raw black metal band or to receive a good studio mixing from a professional sound engineer. I was first introduced to this band way back in 2015 when someone recommended that I check out their 2004 album Desert Northern Hell. Later on I got my hands on a copy of their 2002 record Demonic Possession. A few months ago while I was working one of the football games at my job, I wanted to tune out the fucking annoying college marching band so I started blaring the Kill For Satan album in my noise canceling ear buds. To be honest, I have never been fully blown away by this band musically but enjoyed the very raspy vocals. To me they are the closest to Pest era Gorgoroth that we're going to get despite the less desirable production. Tsjuder has always been a stand out among all the others in the genre because they don't sound like their music was recorded with a potato or an old Nokia phone that you can play Snake on. If you're new to this band, most of the black metal elitists would point you in the direction of their older material but I on the other hand would strongly suggest introducing potential new fans to this album. I feel like showing the younger generation the raw side of this band might be a turn off but this album manages to keep the raw feel while still having some standout guitar riffs. A great example of this would be the hit new track titled "Prestehammeren". Another one would be for their song "Gods of Black Blood" and it even has a nice corny music video to go with it. Sometimes cheesy black metal videos work and other times they don't, in this case it does. It has everything you could ever want in a black metal music video from: burning inverted crosses, to skulls to the band members carrying torches and screaming into the camera in full corpse paint. "Iron Beast" is a great way to begin this record but "Surtr" is one of my favorites. If we're being completely honest, this album is good at maintaining its prowess but at the same time it also lacks a lot of pizzazz. There isn't a whole lot of standout moments throughout this record but if you enjoy this particular style of black metal then I see their more loyal fans get a kick out of it. I could do more for this review like give shout outs to the band members or try to pronounce some of their foreign song titles, but I just don't see any real reason for me to put more effort into this. Again, this is a good album but at the same time it's not something that I want to rattle on and on about. In conclusion, I don't mean to be so lukewarm about a band that I like but I'm not going to give this a higher rating than a 7 out of 10. If you want to support them, you can get yourself a nice little patch for your battle vest like I did for mine, or you can buy their merch from their Bandcamp page.