Forged in the Mouth of Hell: Behemoth - I, Scvlptor (Album Review) Released: 9/4/26

 

Most bands mellow with age. Behemoth, the extreme metal force from Gdańsk, Poland, appears to be doing the opposite. I, Scvlptor, their latest full-length, finds them in particularly purposeful form: self-aware enough to interrogate their own history, skilled enough to reinvent it, and hungry enough to push into genuinely new territory all at once. At roughly 40 minutes across eight tracks, it's a lean, focused record that rewards close attention. The title track announces itself with the weight of a monument. Nergal has spoken about placing it in the tradition of the band's most epic, large-scale compositions, the kind that feel less like songs and more like rituals. That ambition is audible from the opening moments. But what distinguishes "I, Scvlptor" from being merely a callback to past glories is the unexpected turn it takes mid-flight, something that keeps it feeling alive rather than reverential. Lyrically, it wrestles with a paradox that runs through the entire album: the act of endlessly shaping oneself in full knowledge that the project can never be completed. We are born already moving toward death, and perhaps the point was never victory, only the sculpting itself. It's a heavier philosophical lift than most metal records attempt, and it lands.

"Lord ov the Horizons" is the album's most structurally ambitious moment. Built around a Luciferian parable of a father abandoning a son after the fall, leaving him to rebuild from nothing or disappear entirely, it divides into two distinct halves that feel almost like separate moods sharing a common thread. The first half is lyrical and expansive, drawing on a more rock-oriented tradition with passages that border on the melodic. The second tightens into something harder and more direct. Nergal has noted that the band held this track back deliberately, waiting for the right context. That patience paid off. It would have felt slightly out of place anywhere else in the catalogue; here, it feels essential. The record's most daring moves involve its relationship with the band's own archive. "Rise of the Black Storm of Evil" actually dates back to 1992, when Behemoth were teenagers absorbing the lessons of Samael, Celtic Frost, and Hellhammer and producing something raw and somewhat rudimentary in response. Rather than preserve it as a historical curiosity, Nergal seems to have effectively rebuilt it from the inside, keeping the original structure largely intact but reworking the rhythm, layering new guitar arrangements, and tightening lyrics that he acknowledges were, in his own diplomatically chosen words, somewhat excessive in their early form. The result sounds like a present-day Behemoth composition that happens to have unusually deep roots. It's a convincing argument that a good underlying idea doesn't expire; it just waits for the right hands.

"In Thy Pandemaeternum" makes a similar case. Originally appearing on Pandemonic Incantations, the track was always considered by Nergal a victim of its chaotic recording environment, with strong riffs buried beneath a mix that failed to do them justice. The reworked version here strips away that muddiness and lets those ideas breathe properly for the first time. It stops just short of feeling like an entirely new composition, which is precisely the point. The architecture was always there; it simply needed better light. "Begotten" arrives as the album's genuine wildcard. It didn't make the cut for the previous record "Shit ov God" as it stood too far apart from the surrounding material and was very different. If you listen to it here, however, that stylistic choice is immediately apparent. There's a catchiness to it, a post-gothic leanness, something almost new wave in its construction that sits at an angle to the rest of the band's output. On paper, it should feel like an oddity. In practice, it functions as one of the most memorable tracks on the record, the kind of song that lingers precisely because it refuses to behave as expected. Nergal has called it a hidden treasure, and it's difficult to argue.

The collaborative pieces that close the album each carry their own distinct energy. The Venom cover "In League with Satan," reportedly born from the same creative moment that actually inspired the joint tour with Dimmu Borgir, features Shagrath on guest vocals and was recorded on seven-string guitars, giving the original a considerably heavier centre of gravity. It's a loving tribute that nonetheless sounds entirely like a Behemoth record, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. The album closes with a live recording of Bathory's "The Return of Darkness and Evil," captured in Athens with Rotting Christ's Sakis Tolis alongside and deliberately presented in its raw, unreconstructed live form rather than a cleaned-up studio version, it closes the record with electricity and heat, a reminder that this music was built for rooms full of people, and that something essential would be lost by smoothing the edges away. Taken whole, I, Scvlptor is the work of a band that has earned the right to range freely across their own history without being trapped by it. It excavates, reinvents, collaborates, and occasionally surprises, sometimes within the same track. It won't displace the towering records that defined Behemoth's legacy, nor does it seem particularly interested in trying. What it offers instead is something arguably more difficult to achieve: proof that after three decades, the process of sculpting is still very much underway, and still producing something worth hearing.

Take a look at the official music video for their title track I, Scvlptor now:

Go give them a follow if you haven't already: Behemoth