If you’re already a Roadburn veteran and you remember the 2013 edition, there’s a high possibility The Ruins Of Beverast will feature among your highlights. It’s one of those shows that has entered Roadburn lore, for the unbridled intensity displayed by the band that caught Roadburners off-guard and blew a hyper-packed Het Patronaat away. Even if you were unlucky and couldn’t get in, the vision of thick clouds of smoke emanating from inside the venue as if they were ancient evil spirits escaping millennia of enslavement, to the sound of muffled, hellish noise, was truly one to behold as well.

And to think the brainchild of Aachen-born Meilenwald (who does everything on the records) at that point didn’t even have the monumental Exuvia record, released this past May to universal praise from every quarter. Well, now they do, and so it is with palpable excitement that we have invited Meilenwald and his cohorts back for some more of that unforgettable (black) magic.

We can only dream (it’s more of a nightmare, really) how the recurring Native American themes of the new songs, with their spiritual connections, war chants and even flutes, will sound on a Roadburn stage, especially when hedged by those harrowing torrents of blackness from Blood Vaults or Foulest Semen Of A Sheltered Elite that we already know so well.

We can’t wait for The Ruins Of Beverast to fill up the stage with black/doom, smoke and fear on Friday, 20 April at 013 venue, when playing Exuvia in its entirety.

José Carlos Santos / November 2017