Behölder – In the Temple of the Tyrant – Album Review

12th May 2025 0 By Jon Deaux

They brought me the record in a brown paper sleeve, as if smuggling contraband into the crypt. Acolyte Jacob said the band was called Behölder, and that the album bore the title In the Temple of the Tyrant. I nodded gravely and returned to my chair by the stained-glass window, where the sunlight filters through in sickly bruises of color. The bottle of Saint John’s Wort tincture clinked gently in my robes. I unscrewed the cap. I pressed play.

And thus began the sermon.

The first notes groaned like ancient hinges, the guitars tuned to the pitch of rust and regret. The riffs—oh, Lord, the riffs—drag their knuckles through ash and moss, oozing a sacramental distortion that echoes through crypts of forgotten gods. It is doom, yes, but not the theatrical kind that rattles chains for effect. No, this is slow-burning sorrow in drop C, monolithic and stained with incense smoke and blood-slick stone.

The opener, “A Pale Blood Sky”, coils like incense in a dead cathedral. The bass lumbers forward, tectonic, as if it bears the weight of ancestral sin. Vocals arrive not as declarations but as ritual invocations—half-chant, half-growl—like a monk who’s swallowed the Book of Lamentations and gargled holy tar. I felt something shift in my chest. Not hope—never hope—but acknowledgment.

They know.

“Eyes of the Deep (feat Tomi Joutsen of Amorphis) “is perhaps the most heretical of the rites—six minutes of leaden groove and celestial despair. There’s a moment, around the fifth minute, where a lead guitar line pierces through the mire like a single candle flickering in the nave. It made me weep softly into my sleeve. The antidepressants dulled the blade, yes, but the ache remained. A velvet sadness. A sanctified fatigue.

By the time I reached “Summoned & Bound”, I was no longer simply listening—I was kneeling before it. The song trudges like a funeral procession for a god no one remembers, and yet somehow we all miss. The snare drum hits like a nail driven into memory, and its decay felt like a closing prayer. Or an abandonment.

There is no escape in this temple. No deliverance, no rapture. Only slow-burning reverence for the tyrant within—the depressive monarch of the self, robed in apathy and crowned with dread.

And yet I shall return.

Behölder has crafted a monument of spiritual erosion, a sacred ruin where the faithful and the faithless may gather to weep in slow motion. In the Temple of the Tyrant is not merely an album—it is a place. A cloister for the heavy-hearted. A cathedral for the perpetually sedated.
Score 7/10
Track List
1. A Pale Blood Sky [Music Video | Audio]
2. Dungeon Crawl
3. Into The Underdark [Playthrough Video] 4. Eyes of the Deep (featuring Tomi Joutsen of Amorphis) [Lyric Video | Audio] 5. For Those Who Fell
6. Draconian (Slave or Master) [Visualizer | Audio] 7. Summoned & Bound
8. I Magus
Label:Black Lion Records