Doing for Cymru what Darkthrone’s A Blaze In The Northern Sky and Immortal’s Sons Of Northern Darkness once did so territorially for Norway, Ysbrydnos’s latest album, Welsh Mythical Darkness, drives another blade deep in the black metal map.
“It’s a declaration,” claims the project’s inscrutable architect, Ysbryd. “A statement that Wales and its legends are to be celebrated. For the last few years, I’ve been using Ysbrydnos as a vehicle to forge personal connections with the Welsh landscape, and this album revisits places important to me, such as Twmbarlwm in Risca and Carmarthen, tying them to fictional versions of their histories.”
Ysbryd’s treatments of his country’s past owe much to the visionary approaches of author-cum-mystics such as Alan Moore and late Welsh supernaturalist Arthur Machen.
“These guys use local legends to create their narratives,” Ysbryd explains. “I hope to remind people that magic is alive in the everyday, in nature and in the places where we live.”
Fully conscious of the problematic relationships between myth, history and nationalism, Ysbryd is quick to distance himself from “the flag-waving, beer-bellied fascists using ‘pride’ as a synonym for intolerance”.
Instead, enhanced by folkish melodies and dungeon synth atmospherics, his fantastical tales – full of wraith-inhabited castles, blood-harvesting hobgoblins and cryptids descended from Madoc, a 12th-century Welsh prince – conjure an alternative medievalism doubling as allegories in support of a marginalised people.
“Tracks such as A Fallow Harvest focus on divisions between rich and poor, exposing the myth of menial work as the peasant’s lot in life,” explains Ysbryd.
“Welsh Mythical Darkness is a rallying cry for Welsh culture – a haunted shriek boldly proclaiming that even after being invaded, our language being banned and every effort being made to remove local culture from the minds of people, we still exist, and are proud to be Welsh.”
This article was originally published in Metal Hammer issue 415, July 2026. Welsh Mythical Darkness is out now.
