Formed in that fateful year of 1993, in the glare of burning churches, Sweden’s NEFANDUS released their debut demo, Behold the Hordes, in 1995. Albeit seemingly humble on the surface, Behold the Hordes proved that the trio of Ushtar, Blackwinged, and Belfagor (the latter also forming the influential OFERMOD in 1996) started on a good, freezing/fiery foot indeed. But it was their debut album the next year, The Nightwinds Carried Our Names, which carried the NEFANDUS name into the annals of cult black metal. Bearing the same hallmarks of the demo – spiraling violence, haunting melodicism, maximum grimness – here on their debut album do the duo fully flex their songwriting chops, finding that ever-elusive balance between the epic and the immediate, between blanching urgency and delayed-gratification maturity. And while it retains that quintessentially mid ‘90s Swedish flair, The Nightwinds Carried Our Names has held up exceedingly well over the years; if anything, in today’s resurgence of melodic black metal, it sounds exceptionally fresh and forward-thinking.