Nine years after their debut album on Amor Fati and the late Fallen Empire Records, Belgium’s LVTHN return with their second full-length. The Devil’s Bridge is a sacrificial architecture. It is a crossing built not for safety, but for surrender. A liminal altar raised above the abyss, where the soul is stripped, inverted, and offered to the Adversary.
This is not a concept album. This is a work of devotion. A weapon of Will. A hymn to Lucifer, as light-bearer and destroyer alike. Each composition on The Devil’s Bridge was summoned through ritual and ordeal – not written, but received. The music bears the marks of trance, of gnosis, of the trembling threshold between revelation and ruin. The lyrics are incantations, extracted like teeth from the mouth of waking reality. They are hymns to the Serpent, praises to the Black Flame, and calls to those nameless powers that lurk in the beyond.
Sonically, the album advances the LVTHN doctrine: fierce, adversarial black metal that channels dissonance and tension into ecstatic release. It binds the feral strength of the old waves with sharpened modernity. Both disciplined and chaotic, both ascetic and violent. It is music as weapon. Music as curse. Music as rite.
The bridge itself is a metaphor, but also a real place – not of geography, but of experience. To cross it is to relinquish the self. To walk it is to betray the false light, and at the foot awaits the Devil. Not as myth, but as force, as initiator, as destroyer of illusions.
This album is a doorway. Those who step through will not return the same.
Of final, especial note is the album’s title track. On it, Kark of comrades Dødsengel was brought as a guest: only he does not merely perform; he becomes the Devil incarnate. His voice coils like incense around the altar, speaking with a tongue not his own. What he delivers is not a verse, but possession, a spirit channeled through flesh, crowned in flame. In this utterance, the Devil is not summoned…He speaks.
