Wolves In The Throne Room – Crypts Of Ancestral Knowledge Review

Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I reluctantly accept that the twenty minutes of music Wolves in the Throne Room recorded for this EP is likely all we’ll have heard from the band in 2023. But I reserve the right to want more. And perhaps that’s the point with something like Crypts of Ancestral Knowledge, which, by the way, features one of the best tracks (“Beholden to Clan”) from the band in twelve years.

Though Crypts largely amounts to a continuation of 2021’s Primordial Arcana with the stripped-down approach, it feels less like a teaser and more like a shorter episode of your favorite TV show. Like the Malevolent Grain EP before it, there are four corners to this release. It is self-contained. Sufficiently independent as to avoid a stopgap label. And the opening track, “Beholden to Clan,” makes a particularly striking impression, one that in some ways flies a bit in the face of everything that follows, being the one song that doesn’t quite qualify as Arcana-like. Sure, it’s on the shorter end (6:57), but its path is decidedly more winding and layered than most of Primordial Arcana and, thus, Crypts, as well. It has an almost “album unto itself” quality, and it is quite easily the most compelling song on the EP.

Our first taste of Crypts was the more direct “Twin Mouthed Spring,” which, to its credit, feels lifted from Arcana, with its appeal being its more muscular and riff-dominant approach. There’s an undeniable weight and immediacy to the song that contrasts nicely with “Beholden to Clan.” The tremolo to acoustic to tremolo pattern is comfy, almost meditative. And I suppose that’s where Arcana registered with me. This era of Wolves in the Throne Room is a distilled version of the band, reflecting back, to me anyway, how I hear them in my head after seventeen years and seven full-lengths. Sure, in trimming what some might call fat, there’s a slightly less adventurous feel here. There was a thrill in where songs like “Ahrimanic Trance” might take you. There’s less of that here, though “Beholden to Clan” arguably does that in less time. But there is a benefit and payoff to the concentrated approach the band took with Primordial Arcana (and again takes here).

The EP’s third song, “Initiates of the White Hart,” pushes the band even further into Arcana-like territory. Perhaps not the most inspired concept on paper, this atmospheric industrial reimagining of “Spirit of Lightning” works because of its thoughtful placement after the more immediate “Twin Mouthed Spring.” The song effectively cuts through the intensity developed between the first two tracks: more the classic palette cleanser than a tone setter.

Functionally, the fourth and final track, “Crown of Stone,” sounds like a transitional piece, a “to be continued.” Perhaps it is also a “calm before the storm,” though we can’t now be sure that what comes next is a proper storm. Regardless, it is entirely atmospheric.

I arrived late to black metal, and I imagine I am not the only one who followed the traditional to prog to thrash to death to black metal trajectory. Diadem of 12 Stars and Two Hunters were a significant part of that journey for me. Songs such as “Beholden to Clan” and “Twin Mouthed Spring” are a fitting continuation of that adventure. Sometimes—oftentimes, even—that’s all you need.