Review by Rick Eaglestone
Iskald – Curse of the Mind
Record Label: Dusktone
Year: 2026
Rating: 7/10
Eight years is a long time to leave a fire unattended, especially in a scene as crowded as Norwegian Black Metal, where silence is too often read as surrender. Iskald, founded in Sortland in 2005 by Simon Larsen and Aage Krekling, last released a full-length with Innhøstinga in 2018, and it would have been easy to quietly file them among the northern acts whose best days were behind them. Curse Of The Mind makes a persuasive case against that. Their sixth full-length, and the first they have built entirely around a single concept, it arrives through Dusktone with a reshaped line-up and a clear hunger to show that the gap was spent gathering strength rather than drifting.
For much of their history, Iskald were a studio duo, with Larsen on vocals, guitars, and bass and Krekling behind the kit. The credits here tell a different story: Krekling now fronts the band as vocalist, Larsen is listed on guitar alongside long-time live guitarist Ben Hansen, and bassist Tobias Aubert and drummer Isak Larsen complete a full five-piece. The album was tracked in the summer of 2025 at Strand Studio in Beiarn, with Hallstein Sandvin handling both mix and master, and the ambition is evident from the track list alone. The story borrows its scenery from Helheim, the Norse realm of the dead, but the real journey happens behind the eyes, the land of the dead standing in for a mind turning against itself. Four principal chapters carry the narrative, each one preceded by an Invocation that serves as a ritual doorway into what follows, ranging from almost five minutes down to under one.
That architecture is the record’s defining decision, and it shapes how the whole thing should be heard. At just over forty-three minutes and eight tracks, this is not an album to be raided for singles or shuffled into a playlist; it is designed as a single descent, and it rewards the listener who commits to it from the first bar to the last. Musically, Iskald remain rooted in the melodic wing of their homeland’s tradition, nearer to the windswept grandeur of Windir and the early Enslaved records than to the deliberate squalor of the Darkthrone school. The hooks are there, the tremolo lines sing as often as they sting, but everything is now in service of the story.
Iskald
Curse Of The Mind – Invocation I opens the book with a little over four and a half minutes of scene-setting before flowing straight into The Other Realm, subtitled The Descent by the band. This is the chapter where the story leaves solid ground behind, a journey into a grey and featureless nowhere with no company but the narrator’s own thoughts, and the music is built to match, holding back from any easy release and keeping the listener as unmoored as its protagonist. It is a bold opening, and a clear sign that Iskald has no interest in simply picking up where Innhøstinga left off.
Manifestation Of Madness, The Prison in the band’s scheme, is where the mind stops merely wandering and starts to come apart at the seams, and it is here that the five-piece line-up earns its keep. The twin-guitar interplay gives the chapter a restless, splintered quality, lines crossing and pulling against one another, while Isak Larsen’s drumming keeps the whole structure from tipping into chaos. Krekling’s vocals carry the weight of the narrative throughout the record, a harsh, cold rasp that suits the material, and on this chapter, he sounds like a man arguing with his own reflection.
After the brief, piano-led Invocation III, the album reaches its emotional turning point with A Burden Of Hope. At over eight minutes it is the second-longest piece here, and the title is well chosen: hope here is not an escape hatch but a weight to be shouldered, and the only way forward runs through the dark rather than around it. The melodic instincts that have always marked Iskald out come to the fore, and the chapter has a breadth and warmth that feels hard-won after the claustrophobia of the previous two.
The Final Invocation, less than a minute long, is barely a breath before the plunge into The Sacrifice, the chapter the band call The Ritual. At over ten minutes, the closing chapter is the album’s longest and most demanding, and it carries the burden of resolving everything that came before. It is a statement piece in every sense, patient in its construction and willing to let its themes develop at their own pace, and it brings the journey to a close with a sense of finality rather than a neat bow. For anyone who has followed the thread from the opening Invocation, it lands as the conclusion the record has been building toward.
What Curse Of The Mind demonstrates above all is a band unwilling to coast on reputation. Rather than return with a safe set of anthems, Iskald have gambled on scale, structure and story, and the gamble pays off. Its demands are real: the Invocations work best as part of the whole rather than on their own, and those who come to Iskald purely for immediacy may find the record asks more patience than they are used to giving. But the payoff is a black metal album with a genuine shape to it, one that feels composed as a single piece of work rather than assembled from parts. Eight years was a long wait. On this evidence, it was not wasted.
Explore further: