Traditionally Norway has been pretty excellent in providing the world with the best in frost-bitten extremity, so it comes as little surprise that progressive blackened hardcore troupe SIBIIR, who’s self-titled debut album dropped at the very tail-end of 2016, call capital city Oslo their home. Their country’s dark musical history drips ominously from every second of the album, though SIBIIR are far from a simple black metal legacy tribute act, encompassing elements of hardcore (the vicious opener ‘Bekmörke’), Cult Of Luna-esque post-metal (‘The Spiral’), or even shades of Mastodon’s early progressive sludge (‘Erase & Adapt’).

There are plenty of bands out there peddling ‘blackened’ variations of each of these sub-genres, but I struggle to recall any who have married all of them together so convincingly as SIBIIR. That they manage to slide between such disparate styles whilst retaining a cohesive sound is somewhat miraculous, and it’s only a matter of time before they gain some much-deserved wider attention from the extreme music community worldwide. The band’s name comes from the Norwegian word for Siberia, and that monicker accurately represents the harsh, inhospitable soundscapes that SIBIIR create. Listen to them today, or you chance being left out in the cold.