Our review of "Cold Velvet", the third album by German heavy metal band THE NIGHT ETERNAL, is now live — and we gave it a 9/10.
The record lands on August 21 and marks the band's first for Metal Blade Records, after a self-titled EP on Dying Victims Productions in 2019 and two well-received albums for Ván Records: "Moonlit Cross" (2021) and "Fatale" (2023). The German press has been on board for a while. "Moonlit Cross" won the Deaf Forever Soundcheck, placed second in Metal Hammer and third in Rock Hard, and Deaf Forever readers voted the band Newcomer of the Year; "Fatale" took the Rock Hard Soundcheck two years later.
This is not an album that hands itself over on first contact. As we wrote in our review, we did not get much from it initially, and it took a few listens before the songs started to open up — "after which they kept opening up further." The exception was "Eurydice (Don't Look Back)", which landed immediately, and which sits at track two between two of the three advance singles without having been released as one itself.
One of the album's stranger decisions is how it treats its guitars. On a first pass it sounds like there are no solos at all; in fact they are there, mixed at the same level as the rhythm parts so they slip by without demanding attention. Two guitarists and no showcase moments is an unusual way to build a record like this.
What the album does lean on is Ricardo Baum's voice, given a lot of room and soaked in reverb and echo — the source of most of the eighties feel running through it. On "Caught In A Spell" that goes further than atmosphere, with a mid-tempo gallop under a vocal line whose phrasing edges toward eighties pop. Elsewhere, "The Veins Of Time" is quicker and simultaneously catchy and melancholy, while "The Watcher Of The Burning Veil" is the most straightforwardly classic heavy metal song here, "ohh-ohh" refrains and all.
Michael Zech of SECRETS OF THE MOON recorded, produced and mixed the album at Church Of Sound Studios near Munich between May and December 2025 — the band's first time working with him. Eight tracks, no concept, no linking passages, just songs written for the same record and hanging together anyway.
Two albums on Ván built THE NIGHT ETERNAL a reputation that never travelled far beyond Germany. This one deserves to.
Read the full review: THE NIGHT ETERNAL — "Cold Velvet"