Year: 2021
Total Time: 46:09
Label: Season Of Mist

When a band with the history of NIGHTFALL comes back after eight years with a new album, this can only be “big news”. I remember myself spinning “Macabre Sunsets” when I was a kid and having the most unconventional extreme metal experience of my youth. I’ve been following them since and reaching 2013’s “Cassiopeia” I have to confess I found my favorite moment of the band: Top notch song writing, “proggy” but not too complex structures, melodic riffing and soloing and after that masterpiece, a seven years long silence leaving me wondering what’s going on in the Athenian Metallers’ camp. Having the new album in my hands and before the first listen, I’m writing this first paragraph as an introduction to my review, closing it with what I expect: I expect a more symphonic “Cassiopeia”, with some female vocals maybe and a sound more to the progressive side with many melodic riffs and soloing…

-PLAY-

A few days later I’m back to my text, finishing my review and thinking that Nightfall’s “At Night We Prey” was totally beyond my expectation. If I had to describe it using just one word, that word would be “dark”.  This thing is dark as hell. Yes, it’s heavy, much heavier than I expected, it’s mean, it’s angry, it attacks brutally in it’s faster parts and it suffocates you during it’s slower ones.

With every album I review, I always take a few listens before reading the lyrics, trying to imagine what the theme is about. With NIGHTFALL I was prepared to be two times attentive and to keep my poetic antennas ready to capture the metaphors knowing that Efthimis Karadimas isn’t a lyricist that just throws words on a blank piece of paper. Instead, he is quite competent in writing most personally and at the same time most universally. His themes aren’t always easy to decipher, but when you unlock the code everything becomes clear and totally coherent. I’ve learned that the hard way with 1997’s “Lesbian Show”.

My first impression was that the hole album had to do with the decadence of the city of Athens during the financial crisis and the pandemic that followed. The everyday life that totally changed to the worst, the suicides, the overall depression, the anger and the desperation the Greek people have experienced. Well, after reading the lyrics, I’ve reached the footnote which started with the phrase: “At Night We Prey is about people suffering from depression that leads to suppressed anger”. 

Well, I didn’t quite get it but I guess I wasn’t very far away from the message that was intended by the artist.  And I’m writing this not because I want to brag about how “clever” I am as a listener, but because I want to underline that NIGHTFALL with their music and lyrics have managed to produce an overall “semantic environment” that passes more or less clearly their message to the attentive listener.

The theme of depression is often discussed by Efthimis Karadimas on recent interviews for the album and on a very interesting PODCAST (in Greek) as he struggled with it trying to identify, explain and control it; a struggle metaphorically depicted on the album’s excellent artwork made by Travis Smith. Opening up the subject in public, aside from putting it in music and lyrics as a personal situation, is part of an effort to raise awareness about depression defeating the stigma of the illness and helping people suffering from it to reach out and get the help that they need to overcome it.

The album takes off with an atmospheric piano introduction and what a surprise awaits around the corner with the second track that builds up to an obliterating metal riff. A thing that is very interesting and that stroke me as a surprise from the album’s beginning is how the drums, the guitar and the bass collaborate in the heart of the riff. I mean that every instrument plays the riff rather than accompanying “a leader” and after a while things change and we have different roles in the musical structure. This fact apart from being a choice in the orchestration that releases huge amounts of energy is also proof of the collective approach to the composition of the material.

E. Karadimas (bass & vocals), Galiatsos (guitars) and F. Bernando (drums) are totally in the same artistic page in “At Night We Prey”. All play to serve the heaviness and the darkness of their vision. As the album progresses the speed gradually diminishes and the overall atmosphere becomes more and more introverted and claustrophobic. “Giants of Anger” with its mid-tempo riffing and open spaces prepares the listener for the passage from the first half of the album to the second one where on the one hand there are bold metal gems like “Temenos” and on the other there are songs with prominent slow doomy passages and experimental lyrical parts such as “Meteor Gods”.

“Martyrs of the Cult of the Dead” is a song with a melodic riff reminiscent of the “old” Nightfall, and I’d say that it’s the first of the three most “gothic” and catchy songs of the album. I find very interesting the fact though that the band didn’t chose this one as a promo release. In my oppinion it has to do with the fact that the identity the band wanted to promote for this album was better represented by songs such as “Killing Moon”,  “Darkness Forever” and “Giants of Anger” all released as lyric videos by Seasons Of Mist.

I admit that after “Cassiopeia” I didn’t expect an album such as “At Night We Prey”. Was it the passage from Metal Blade to Seasons Of Mist that suggested a heavier and more “In your face” approach to the compositions? Was it the thematic material that proposed a different sound? Maybe. Even though I believe that “At Night We Prey” is an overall good album, I feel that I hear two different “Nightfall”: one at the beginning and another one at the last three or four tracks. And don’t get me wrong I’m not saying that there are “fillers” in the album, it’s just that the style of the music changes so dramatically towards the end that one might think that there are two separate musical identities that antagonize each other and who knows which one will eventually dominate. Or it might be that Nightfall is both of them, the “deathier” first part and the “gothier” second one. Nevertheless, personally I felt that the aforementioned change of style interrupted somehow the albums thematic continuity.

Closing my review, I’d say that NIGHTFALL with “At Night We Prey” declare themselves present and relevant with the extreme metal scene of today. The band sounds fresh and (to my ears at least) in the middle of crossing a border or, if you prefer, of evolving their sound. Let’s see what the future holds…

Rating: 8/10
Editor: Yiannis Tziallas
Related link: NIGHTFALL – Bandcamp Page