Iceland’s black metal scene has earned its reputation not through volume alone but through a genuine conviction that is difficult to manufacture. Misþyrming, Svartidauði, Sinmara – these are bands that operate with an almost liturgical seriousness, and they’ve made Iceland the most vital proving ground in contemporary black metal. Forsmán, out of Kópavogur, are the newest names to enter that lineage. Their debut full-length, Brenndar Rústir & Fuðrandi Fjörur, doesn’t ease its way into that conversation. It kicks the door down.
The band’s only prior release, the 2021 EP Dönsum í logans ljóma, signaled something formidable in development – raw, atmospheric, rooted in the same devotional darkness that runs through the veins of the Icelandic underground. What Brenndar Rústir & Fuðrandi Fjörur makes clear is that the intervening years were not idle. The four members – all in their early twenties – have delivered a debut that sounds less like a band finding its footing and more like one that has already arrived, knowing exactly where it is going.
The album’s title suggests a conceptual framework – Brenndar Rústir & Fuðrandi Fjörur translates roughly to “Burned Ruins & Raging Shores” – and the tracklist sustains that sense of scorched and turbulent geography. But the narrative remains deliberately, perhaps productively, opaque. This is not a record that hands you a key. If there is a through-line, it lives in atmosphere and emotional register rather than explicit storytelling: urgency, rage, desperation, and something approaching a kind of feral spiritual crisis.
What the production achieves – and the album’s cover artwork by Paolo Girardi (Power Trip, Sulphur Aeon) signals this before a single note plays – is a sense of density that never collapses into murk. The guitars carry down-tuned weight while retaining enough definition to track the intricate riffwork underneath. The rhythm section drives without dominating. The vocals, split between death-growl and shrieked registers, sit in the mix like a second instrument rather than an afterthought. For a debut full-length, the sonic cohesion is striking.
Opener “Drottinn Fyrirgefur Allt” – one of two pre-release singles – establishes the template with severity and no preamble: malevolent riffing, shifting dynamics that suggest something almost compositional beneath the surface violence, and an atmosphere that feels less performed than inhabited. “Svartir Svanir” follows and sustains it. Together, these two tracks function as a battering ram – not because they are sonically identical, but because they build cumulative pressure in a way that makes the subsequent exhale feel necessary and earned.
That exhale comes with “Valdníðsla.” The tempo drops, the soundscape becomes suffocating in a different way – not the forward-motion assault of the opener pair, but something closer to submersion. It’s the drowning track, the moment before the vortex pulls you back under. Forsmán understand pacing well enough to know that the most disorienting thing you can do mid-record isn’t accelerate – it’s decelerate, and make the listener sit with something they can’t escape. “Kynjamyndir” then does something unexpected: it pulls toward the mid-tempo, toward something that approaches, if not quite accessibility, then at least a kind of rhythm that a listener can orient themselves by. It is the one moment on the album where the seething eases enough to let you catch your breath – before the remaining tracks close that gap entirely.
The reference points that come to mind – Horna’s devotional rawness, Acherontas’ ritualistic menace – are accurate as far as they go, but Forsmán aren’t simply working from those templates. The Misþyrming influence is real and visible in the forward-driving momentum, the refusal to let atmosphere become a substitute for compositional clarity. What distinguishes Brenndar Rústir & Fuðrandi Fjörur is the neurotic quality underneath it – a manic, unpredictable volatility that makes the record feel genuinely destabilizing rather than merely abrasive.
This is not a record you manage. It manages you. There are stretches of Brenndar Rústir & Fuðrandi Fjörur that operate less like music than like a substance working through your system – disorienting, pulling at the edges of control, demanding something you didn’t consciously agree to give. That is not an easy thing to achieve, and most bands that attempt it produce only discomfort rather than the particular intoxication that Forsmán sustain across eight tracks. The distinction matters.
Forsmán have not simply introduced themselves – they’ve staked a claim. Brenndar Rústir & Fuðrandi Fjörur is primal and precise in equal measure, and on this evidence, they belong exactly where Iceland’s black metal underground has placed them. Forsmán are exactly as dangerous as Iceland’s underground suggested they would be.
Review
Overall - 9
9
Forsmán arrive with considerable force on their debut full-length, delivering a record that earns its place in Iceland's formidable black metal lineage without coasting on the scene's reputation. Brenndar Rústir & Fuðrandi Fjörur moves with the rawness of something uncut and the precision of something deeply considered — disorienting, destabilizing, and genuinely difficult to shake. On this evidence, Forsmán don't belong to the next wave of Icelandic black metal — they are it.
