Primordial Arcana (Black with Gold/Green Splatter Vinyl)

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM cranked out four excellent albums in the aforementioned hybridized stylistic approach but then 2011's "Celestial Lineage" dabbled in blackgaze and with the following "Celestite" pretty much abandoned the metal aspects altogether in favor of an electronic space ambient album with only traces of drone metal. This did not go over well with fans and the band has sort of been licking its wounds ever since and although WITTR returned in 2017 with the excellent "Thrice Woven," so many new bands had come onto the scene that it seemed that this band sort of sputtered out of the race.
Oh how finicky metal fans can be! Four years later WOLVES returns with its ninth overall studio album PRIMORDIAL ARCANA and makes a welcome return to the full-on atmospheric black metal from the past. While some are crying retrograde and others are castigating the band for backpedaling and relying too much on its past glories rather than innovation, the truth is WOLVES needed to re-establish itself as the atmospheric black metal band that it once was if it wanted to remain relevant in the black metal game. In recent years all sorts of metal bands ranging from Leprous, Haken and The Ruins of Beverast just to name a few have toned down their metal ferocity and in the process have alienated quite a few fans although they surely must have gained some new ones.