Bandcamp A record that waited its turn
Simon Lindgren has put out five full lengths as Tårfödd since 2022, plus EPs, singles and collaborations, at a rate that outruns anybody trying to keep up. This one he finished in late 2025 and then held back. His own note on it says he is not entirely sure why, only that he had other albums going and chose to release those first.
That is an unusual thing to admit about the record you made after losing someone close. He is explicit about the subject: the loss, and then the loneliness, anger, regret and self-hatred that follow it. So the most personal thing in the catalogue is also the one that sat in a drawer while the queue moved.
He plays all of it. The Bandcamp credits list him for guitars, bass, vocals, lyrics, drum programming, production and mix, with Simon Lundin mastering and Johanna Furberg guesting on a bonus track. Vindur of Drömskogen Art supplied the sleeve, a skull worked out of ink and smoke in greyscale, and it tells you which shelf this belongs on before a note plays.
Two modes, and you can hear which one you are in
The album has one structural idea and commits to it hard. A song either opens on an acoustic guitar and treats it as the floor it is about to fall through, or it starts inside the wall and never steps outside.
“I Spåren Av Pestens Art” takes nearly three minutes of warm, close picking before the distortion lands, and the distance it travels between those two states is the widest thing on the record. “It Never Goes Away” is built the same way, and so is the closing title track, which adds a clean vocal in its quiet middle that lands better than it has any business doing on an album this bleak.
Then there is the other mode. “Hjärtesorg” and “Totalt Mörker” stay inside the wall from start to finish, and both hold a far narrower distance between their loudest and quietest moments than anything else here. On “Totalt Mörker” that works, because the song is written as a single slow grind and the lack of relief is the argument. On “Hjärtesorg” it does not. The guitars are tuned low enough to sit on top of the bass instead of next to it, the kick has no attack left to cut through, and five minutes that should read as a descent turn into undifferentiated grey.
Where it actually hurts
The two best things here are the bookends, and they are also the two longest, just under ten minutes each. Neither narrates the subject. Both keep returning to a quiet figure and then losing it again, which is a good deal closer to how this kind of loss actually behaves than any amount of screaming, and both songs seem to know that. The opener earns its three minute approach. The closer earns the clean voice.
What the record cannot do is detail. Across all seven tracks the middle of the spectrum takes more than half of the total energy and the bottom never gets more than a fifth, which in practice means the bass holds the floor rather than saying anything, and individual notes disappear inside the saturation once the guitars are up. In this corner of black metal that texture is a tradition rather than an accident, and judging it by a cleaner genre’s standards would be unfair. It does set a ceiling, though. This album can be crushing. It cannot be legible.
So
Worth your time, and the reservation is easy to state: two of the seven tracks are noticeably weaker than the rest, and both of them are the ones that never let the acoustic guitar in. Everything built on that contrast works, and the pair at either end works very well. If Lindgren released half as often and cut those two, this would be a considerably better album than it is, and it is already a decent one.
The record sorts itself cleanly into two groups. Five tracks run between ten and twenty decibels between their quietest and loudest passages, and those five are exactly the ones with acoustic or clean sections, “I Spåren Av Pestens Art” opening the widest of all. The other two, “Totalt Mörker” and “Hjärtesorg”, stay inside four to five decibels for their whole length, which is what an unbroken wall measures like. The tonal picture barely moves across the album: every track puts more than half of its energy into the range from eight hundred hertz to five kilohertz and keeps the bottom below a fifth, so the guitars own the middle and the bass functions as foundation rather than as a voice. “Hjärtesorg” carries the highest tonal centre of the seven and the least weight at the bottom, which matches how little separation it has where the guitars and bass meet. Nothing here has been mastered flat, peaks keep a real distance from the average throughout.
Standout tracks: I Spåren Av Pestens Art, En Känsla Av Hopplöshet, It Never Goes Away
