Stick a bunch of Finns together in a winter war bunker with copies of Blood Fire Death and Under the Sign of the Black Mark, and you might get this imaginative band that stands astride black metal, speed metal, and epic heavy metal with an emphasis on changing atmosphere.
Much of this album will sound “wrong” to modern black metal edgy fans who understand the canon as fixed riff forms and not a language of ideas that generate those riff forms, but Havukruunu likes to set up a forward inertia and then contort it into a sublimination of norms that leads to moments of cinematic grandeur and melody rising into an expectation of emptiness.
Occasional direct allusions to Bathory occur throughout the album but always get repurposed into a homebrew sense of melody and rhythm that appears idiosyncratic to this band, who use enough of the heavy metal origins of black metal to give their music levity which is then promptly destroyed by darker atavism emerging from within.