Feeding Frenzy: 1349 – Winter Mass (live album)

1349 – Winter Mass (live album)

Release date: 28th November 2025||Genre: Black metal||Label: Season of Mist

There’s often some ambiguity with a live album…

Sure, it’s an essential buy for a ride-or-die fan and although, in essence, a truer representation of a band for any newcomer, the concept is driven by a live performance rather than the atmospheric concept an album forms. This said, if you can capture just a droplet of the ferocity and magnetism of 1349’s Parkteatret show in their hometown Oslo, then it’d be sacrilegious not to share this spellbinding performance with the rest of the world.

Having had the pleasure of witnessing the extraordinary Kim Diaz Holm eternalising frontman Ravn by paper and ink at this year’s Inferno Music Conference, I was enraptured before the first notes of the aptly named, opening track, Enter Inferno. It was during recent favourite Striding the Chasm that Kim captured the blistering aggression of the show, whipping up the album’s artwork whilst headbanging in the pit.

Unhappy with the direction the genre took during the mid-90s, vocalist Ravn formed the 1349 with like-minded bassist Seidemann in 1997. The band’s current lineup – which is bolstered by guitarist Archaon and Frost (who also drums for Satyricon) – has been in place since 2001. Each of their eight studio albums have been inspired by the same guiding principal: to bring back the grimness, the eeriness and the primal emotions of Norwegian black metal.

“I will always be here / In all ways in all times” snarls Ravn on hellacious cut I Am Abomination, for which a live video coincides with the release.

Early classics like Sculptor of Flesh thrash with unchained madness and after three decades, and with no sign of halting, what was once a proclamation is now a testament to 1349’s enduring firepower. If you have followed the band’s vivisection of KVLT then you know that they are aortic to the genre. They are vitality. If not, then Winter Mass showcases the onward resuscitation that 1349 and their peers continue to breathe into NBM, and I would highly recommend beholding the aural hellfire live in the flesh.

A+

AVZD