Seventh Secular Crusade by Nazghor is the kind of bombastic, chest-bursting Melodic Black Metal odyssey that doesn’t so much begin as it detonates around you like a ritual explosion. Sure, it opens with the obligatory haunted-cathedral intro — because of course it does — but the second that minute-long veil lifts, the real crusade begins, and it’s one led by a band who understand exactly how huge, commanding, and monolithic Melodic Black Metal can be when it’s done right.
And make no mistake: Nazghor do it very, very fucking right.
From the moment the guitars properly kick in, Seventh Secular Crusade swells like a great black storm front rolling across the earth. Every track feels built to scale — not in the modern “throw an orchestra at it until it sounds like a Marvel trailer” way, but in that old-school Scandinavian sense of epicness: cavernous riffs, swirling melodies, and a constant forward push that feels like you’re riding into a blizzard on a demonic warhorse. The compositions don’t just fill your ears — they fill your lungs, your bloodstream, your skull.
This album doesn’t “play” so much as invade.
Nazghor have always had a talent for crafting vast soundscapes, but Seventh Secular Crusade is them reaching into their own abyss and coming back with something sharpened, something colder, something carved in obsidian. These songs aren’t just big — they sprawl. Riffs arc overhead like burning meteors, melodies coil around your spine, and the drums… oh, the fucking drums.
There are so many blast-beats on this record you’d think the drummer was being paid by the snare hit. Every track is driven forward by this endless machine-gun assault — a relentless, punishing hailstorm of percussion that gives the whole album this unstoppable sense of momentum. It’s like being chased downhill by an avalanche made of bones and fire.
And while the album is enormous and epic, it never loses the Black Metal heart beating inside it. Nazghor refuse to polish the edges too much, refuse to sand down the serrated blade that makes this genre what it is. For all the grandeur and melodic flourishes, the core is still a hell scape, grim and frostbitten. This is still Black Metal forged in shadows — just played on a battlefield where everything is on fire.
A major part of that impact comes from the vocals. Delivered in a style that sits somewhere between Max Cavalera’s throat-ripped authority and Attila Csihar’s cavernous inferno rasp, they give the album its spine. It’s a voice that sounds human in the way a war-chant is human — primal, violent, ritualistic — but there’s a second, darker layer beneath it, something ghostly and ritualistic that evokes crypts, smoke, and burning banners. The vocals don’t sit on top of the music — they ride it, cut through it, tear into it, commanding the surge beneath.
What I love most is that Seventh Secular Crusade balances its bombast and its brutality with total confidence. The melodic lines soar, the tremolo runs spiral like ascending smoke, and yet the album never once feels like it’s drifting away from the dark heart of the genre. Every time you think Nazghor might let the atmosphere take control, the band lands another hammer blow, another blast, another hook that reminds you exactly what kind of beast you’re dealing with.
This is Black Metal that has learned to walk in massive strides without losing its feral snarl.
Across its runtime, Seventh Secular Crusade never once dips, never once stumbles, never once feels like it’s padding things out or chasing some grandiose ideal. It is grandiose — but authentically so, the way an ancient fortress is grandiose, or a lightning storm over a battlefield. It’s big because it’s meant to be big. It’s epic because it’s built from epic ingredients. And it rages with a fire that doesn’t feel manufactured — it feels earned.
By the end, you don’t feel like you’ve listened to an album.
You feel like you’ve endured a goddamn campaign.
Nazghor have crafted something immense here — a towering, flame-wreathed, steel-clad assault of Melodic Black Metal that honours its lineage while still planting its own banner deep into the earth. Seventh Secular Crusade doesn’t just live up to its name — it defines it.
This one is going to stay with me.
And it’s going to get replayed. Loudly. Often.
Seventh Secular Crusade is available now from the Nazghor Bandcamp page.
CHOICE CUT: Primordial Lineage
BLACK METAL ARCHIVES VERDICT: A towering, fire-breathing slab of triumph — melodic enough to soar, vicious enough to scar. Seventh Secular Crusade doesn’t just ride into battle; it razes the sky behind it, all roaring blasts, war-chant vocals, and obsidian grandeur. Nazghor prove once again that melody means nothing without menace, and here they weld the two into a weapon. A crusade worth bleeding for.
