Album Review: Noctule - Extinguish Thy Flame

 

When did a video game last genuinely change your life? Not kept you up past midnight, not eaten a bank holiday weekend, but actually pulled you back from somewhere dark? For Serena Cherry, the answer is Elden Ring, and Extinguish Thy Flame is her thank-you letter to it, written in tremolo picking, blast beats and more stacked guitar harmonies than any one person has a right to play. It arrives at a pointed moment, too. Svalbard, played their last show in August, and this is the first thing she has put her name to since. So, if you have been wondering what comes next, settle in and grab a Flask of Crimson Tears, because the answer is loud, proud, and entirely hers.

Noctule was born in the first lockdown of 2020, named after the bats Cherry, spotted on her daily walks, and it was never really meant to leave her bedroom. Black metal was her first love long before Svalbard existed; as a teenager she was bashing out demos on a four-track with a Jackson and a budget drum machine, releasing a handful of EPs under another name. Lockdown gave her the time to go back to that, and a few friends persuaded her to put the results out. The debut, Wretched Abyss, landed in May 2021 via Church Road Records and Translation Loss, a frostbitten tribute to Skyrim in which every song mapped onto a dungeon, a storyline, or a weapon from the game. It raised a few purist eyebrows, as anything this unashamedly fun inevitably will, but it found an audience who understood exactly what she was doing, and, as Cherry has put it since, reassured her that extreme metal still has room for things that break the rules.

Tellingly, the follow-up was originally going to stay in Tamriel: Cherry had floated a choral black metal record themed around Sovngarde, the Nordic afterlife of the Skyrim universe, before a very different game took hold of her. Five years on, the game has changed and so has the approach. Extinguish Thy Flame is self-released, written by Cherry alone and pieced together over roughly two years, much of it snatched on the road with Svalbard across 2023, 2024 and 2025. She has talked about a phone full of voice notes, including riffs sung into her phone in a toilet somewhere in Australia, which is about as punk rock a genesis story as you will get for a record this ornate. Production, mixing, and mastering duties went to Keir Campbell, and every note and lyric is hers. Notably, she recorded all of the vocals in a single night, and she has described the difference between the two projects in striking terms: where Svalbard sessions often left her in tears at the mic, Noctule had her standing tall and roaring. The album, she says, is "very much an aggressive album that's got its chest puffed out." On the evidence of the two singles, I believe her.

For anyone who has somehow avoided it, Elden Ring is the 2022 open-world epic from FromSoftware, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki with mythology drafted by George R. R. Martin, and it has sold upwards of thirty million copies. It is also famously, gleefully cruel. Its world is a shattered kingdom ruled by broken demigods, its bosses are designed to humiliate you dozens of times before you finally prevail, and its story is told in scraps, item descriptions, and whispered rumour. In other words, it is about as black metal as a piece of mainstream entertainment gets, and Cherry has made the point herself that both the game and the genre are relentless, uncompromising, and entirely uninterested in holding your hand.

The end of Svalbard hangs over all of this, even if it is never mentioned in the songs. After more than fifteen years and four albums, the band called time because and against that backdrop, a record made entirely on her own terms, with nobody to say no, feels less like a side project and more like a statement of intent.

The concept is simple enough to explain and deep enough to get lost in. After an instrumental scene-setter named for the game's opening region, each track is built around a boss encounter, chosen from a roster of more than two hundred and limited strictly to Cherry's personal favourites. That sounds like a recipe for novelty, but here is the twist: she has openly used these characters as masks through which to process her own life, drawing parallels between their lore and her own experiences. Hiding behind a demigod, she argues, makes it easier to say the difficult things. It is a clever device, and a quietly moving one, because Elden Ring is a game about failure. You die, you learn, you go again. For someone who credits it with pulling her through a period of deep depression, that loop of defeat and persistence is the whole point, and it gives the album an emotional backbone that stops it ever feeling like fan fiction with distortion pedals.

Musically, Cherry has described the record as landing somewhere between melodic death metal and black metal without any deliberate plan to fuse the pair, and she is proud that it sounds like nobody else. On the singles at least, the Gothenburg sense of melody and forward drive is there, wrapped in the cold, reverb-heavy atmosphere of the second wave.

Welcome To Limgrave opens proceedings as an instrumental, named for the windswept starting region every player first stumbles into, blinking, after that opening cave, a place that promises wonder and delivers dread in roughly equal measure.

Devour The Gods almost certainly belongs to Rykard, whose song Cherry has confirmed is on the record: the title is lifted straight from the ambitions of the serpent-bound Lord of Blasphemy, whose scheme to consume the divine made him one of the game's most grotesque and memorable encounters. It is a gift of a subject for extreme metal: heresy, hunger, and a giant snake.

Lord Of Blood is the album's calling card. An ode to Mohg, the towering blood-cult patriarch of the game's underworld palace, it is also, by Cherry's own account, a celebration of making music with nobody to answer to, "a celebration of pure musical independence" in her words. It is a riotous thing, melodic death metal momentum riding on a black metal chassis, and true to her admission that she cannot resist layering harmony upon harmony, the guitars pile up in gleaming stacks. She has singled out its central guitar lead as one of her favourites she has ever written. It is easy to see why. If you want to know whether this album is for you, start here.

Grafted turns its attention to Godrick, the pathetic, power-hungry lord who stitches the limbs of his victims onto his own body in pursuit of strength he was never born with. As a metaphor for insecurity dressed up as dominance, it is wide open, and I suspect Cherry has found plenty in it.

Goddess Of Rot is the record's emotional centrepiece and the second single, and it is the one that will speak loudest to anyone who loved Svalbard. Cherry herself calls it "the solo song that Svalbard fans will appreciate the most," and she is right to. By her own description it is the gentlest and most unhurried song on the record, leaning toward the melancholic Finnish school of Insomnium and Sentenced with a streak of depressive black metal, reverb-soaked leads and a push and pull between raw screams and fragile clean singing. Its subject is Malenia, the game's most notorious boss and its most tragic figure, a warrior who fights to shield her brother while being slowly consumed by the scarlet rot inside her. Cherry frames it as a song about love that curdles into sacrifice and then into loss, about devotion that becomes a punishment, and there is no mistaking that she is singing about more than a boss fight. It is beautiful, and it hurts.

Lament Of The Omen King belongs to Morgott, the cursed demigod rejected by his own family who spends his life defending the very order that cast him out. Cherry has drawn a direct line between his exile and her own sense of never quite belonging to the metal scene, and she has spoken openly in the past about how women are treated in heavy music, so this carries real weight, and I suspect it will be one of the album's most revealing moments. That makes this one of the most personal pieces of writing on the record, at least on paper.

O' Death, Become My Blade Once More, Age Of The Stars and closer Hallowhorn Grounds round out the album, and their titles alone will set seasoned Tarnished nodding knowingly. Age Of The Stars borrows its name from one of the game's most bittersweet endings, the one earned by siding with the witch Ranni, and there is something fitting about an album so preoccupied with defeat and endurance choosing to point towards a new, colder dawn as it nears its close.

The concept could be a barrier for some. If you have never picked up a controller, a record built entirely around boss fights might feel like an in-joke you are not in on. But that would be to miss what Cherry has actually done. Strip the lore away and you are left with songs about abandonment, loyalty, rejection, and the grim, stubborn business of getting back up after being knocked flat, and those need no walkthrough. The game is the frame, not the picture.

Extinguish Thy Flame is the sound of an artist at a crossroads choosing joy, independence, and a very large sword. It is the first chapter of whatever comes after Svalbard, and on this evidence, Serena Cherry is nowhere near finished. Come for the lore or come for the riffs; either way, you will leave with something heavier than you arrived with. Rise, Tarnished.

8/10

 

Tracklist

1. Welcome To Limgrave

2. Devour The Gods

3. Lord Of Blood

4. Grafted

5. Goddess Of Rot

6. Lament Of The Omen King

7. O’ Death

8. Become My Blade Once More

9. Age Of The Stars

10. Hallowhorn Grounds

 

Personnel

Serena Cherry – all music, lyrics, instruments, and vocals

Keir Campbell – production, mixing, and mastering.

Links

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