Bandcamp Goddess are not quite a new band. They’re what’s left of Goatess — the Stockholm-based Swedish doom outfit that ran from the early 2010s onward, until founding guitarist Niklas departed and the rest of the lineup decided that continuing under the old name didn’t make sense. Ritual of the Cloven Hoof, released May 22 on Majestic Mountain Records, is the project’s first album as Goddess and its first under the new name. Karl-Martin Buhre (vocals and guitar), Kenta Karlbom (drums), John Jansson (bass), Anders Martinsgård (guitar). Recorded, mixed and mastered by Joona Hassinen at Studio Underjord; artwork by Jonas/Artnorlen. Six tracks across thirty-seven minutes.
The album’s name-change context matters. There’s a difference between a band’s third or fourth album in a continuous lineage and the first album that bears the name they’re going to be operating under from now on, and Ritual of the Cloven Hoof sits in the second category. The Goatess catalogue is the band’s prehistory; this is the inaugural Goddess statement, and the songwriting carries the kind of considered weight that suggests the band took the rebranding as an opportunity to consolidate rather than as a clean break.
The Six Pieces
“Godless” opens the record at seven and a half minutes, the album’s setting-of-terms cut. Goatess’s vocabulary is intact — slow, riff-driven, fuzz-saturated doom with stoner-rock grooves underneath — but the mix has a rawer, more live-feeling quality than the band’s previous records suggested they’d push toward. Hassinen’s production decision (room-mic-leaning, brick-walled mastering avoided, dynamic range left intact) is the album’s defining choice, and it pays off most clearly on the opener’s slow build.
“Inquisition” at four and forty-seven is the album’s tightest cut, with the most explicit clean-vocal-into-shouted contrast and a structural break that lets the band’s dynamic argument land. “To Be King” at six and forty-one extends the contrast across a longer piece, with atmospheric clean passages bracketing the heaviest riff sections. “Blood Fever” (the album’s lead single) at five and eighteen sits closest to the band’s stoner-doom centre and is the cut that signals where the project’s identity lives.
“Born Again Heathen” at eight and thirty-one is the album’s most ambitious composition — long-form construction, tribal-drum-into-wall dynamics, vocals shifting between clean baritone and harsher ranges. “Devil’s Reef” at four and forty-two closes the album in tightest form, with the heaviest single riff on the record and the album’s most fully-developed lead-guitar work.
The Hassinen Production
Joona Hassinen has been working the Swedish heavy-music underground for the last decade plus, and Studio Underjord’s house sound (warm low-end, organic drum room, fuzz-saturated guitars without sterile digital edges) is the right setting for this record. Ritual of the Cloven Hoof sits in dense, mid-focused production territory throughout, with bass and guitars frequently fusing into a single low-mid wall on the heaviest passages — but the deliberate avoidance of brick-walled mastering keeps the dynamic argument intact. The clean passages and the room-mic drum sound register cleanly; the wall-of-sound moments accumulate the standard genre frequency stacking without ever flattening the album’s pulse.
The reservations are honest. The guttural vocal placements occasionally bury intelligibility deeper than the songwriting probably wants; the kick-drum attack on the densest passages loses some definition under the bass; cymbals on the heavier cuts push toward harshness. These are within-genre quibbles, not project-breakers. What works is the band’s commitment: Goddess have decided that the rebranded project gets a properly considered debut, and the album reflects that decision in its songwriting, its production, and its label home.
Six tracks across thirty-seven minutes, recorded/mixed/mastered by Joona Hassinen at Studio Underjord. Mix philosophy: dense, mid-focused, fuzz-saturated, with deliberate avoidance of brick-walled mastering. Dynamic range is preserved across the album, which is the production’s defining decision. Guitars carry heavy fuzz saturation with chord articulation that reads through the heavier passages; bass functions both as articulate independent voice (the bass-led intros on “Devil’s Reef” and parts of “Born Again Heathen”) and as low-mid foundation (the densest wall passages). Drums are recorded with natural room sound — earthy snare, kick with some click but no overprocessing, cymbals luftig and unobtrusive in the back. Vocals move between clean-baritone and guttural-shouted registers; the guttural passages sit deeper in the mix, the cleans more forward. The album’s strongest production moment is the dynamic contrast on “Born Again Heathen” between tribal-drum-led atmospheric passages and the full-band wall. Frequency stacking in the low-mids (200-500 Hz) is the standing genre trade-off and limits string definition on the densest passages.
Standout tracks: Born Again Heathen for the eight-and-a-half-minute centrepiece’s tribal-into-wall structure. Godless for the seven-minute opener that establishes the album’s vocabulary. Devil’s Reef for the tightest closer’s bass-led heaviest single riff on the record.
Recommended without reservation if you appreciate Swedish stoner-doom that takes the Goatess rebranding seriously and gives the renamed project a properly considered debut. Ritual of the Cloven Hoof is the kind of first album the new name needs to land — Joona Hassinen’s production keeps the band’s organic identity intact, and Majestic Mountain Records is the right label home for the project to move forward from.
