Founded in 2001, German black metal instigators Helrunar have gone from strength to strength, establishing themselves as a band approaching Nordic themes with brains. Records such as "Frostnacht" and "Baldr Ok Íss" are regarded as seminal works for the country's scene before the group shook off genre conventions altogether in favour of a holistic approach to extreme music and its topics. This is manifest in 2011's double album "Sól".
While their sixth full-length "Niederkunfft" (2015) marked the beginning of a new era with recourse to archaic death and doom metal pondering late medieval superstition in the face of the Enlightenment, successor "Vanitas Vanitatum" shows yet another tack, albeit within a similar stylistic framework.