''At the Heart of Winter'' is the fifth studio album by Norwegian

black metal Black metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal music. Common traits include fast tempos, a shrieking vocal style, heavily distorted guitars played with tremolo picking, raw (lo-fi) recording, unconventional song structures, and an emp ...

band

Immortal Immortality is the ability to live forever, or eternal life. Immortal or Immortality may also refer to: Film * ''The Immortals'' (1995 film), an American crime film * ''Immortality'', an alternate title for the 1998 British film ''The Wisdom of ...

. It was released on February 22, 1999 through

Osmose Productions Osmose Productions is a French independent record label created in 1991 by Hervé Herbaut, after he had spent three years running a small mail order company. They specialize mainly in death and black metal bands. Many of the groups who began w ...

. It is the first Immortal album not to feature Demonaz on guitar, as he suffered from acute

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in his hands, as well as the last album until ''

Sons of Northern Darkness ''Sons of Northern Darkness'' is the seventh album by Norwegian black metal band Immortal. Musically, it continues the blackened thrash metal style heard on the two previous releases ''At the Heart of Winter'' and '' Damned in Black''. This was t ...

'' to feature Abbath on bass. The album marks a shift in Immortal's musical sound, towards a black metal and

thrash metal Thrash metal (or simply thrash) is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal music characterized by its overall aggression and often fast tempo.Kahn-Harris, Keith, ''Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge'', pp. 2–3, 9. Oxford: Berg, 2007, . ...

fusion.

Background

''At the Heart of Winter'' was recorded in November 1998 at Abyss Studios in Sweden. It is the first Immortal album not to feature a picture of the band on the cover, and the first to prominently feature the band's new logo, with the cover art was painted by J. P. Fournier.

Release

In addition to a CD release, ''At the Heart of Winter'' was released as a limited-edition metal box, as well as a hand-numbered LP on Osmose, which was later reissued in 2005.

Reception

''At the Heart of Winter'' was well received by critics. John Serba of

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databa ...

praised the album, writing, "the result is a clarity and focus that few purveyors of the genre succeeded at finding, a painstakingly organized assemblage of black metal's base elements into a disciplined purity of metal that prefers the power of the almighty riff, instead of the occasionally overblown classical structuring of much-lauded stalwarts

Emperor An emperor (from la, imperator, via fro, empereor) is a monarch, and usually the sovereignty, sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife (empress consort), ...

and Cradle of Filth, or the strange experimentation that Mayhem and

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would undertake".

Track listing

Personnel

;Immortal * Abbath Doom Occulta – vocals, guitar, bass, synthesizer *

Horgh Horgh (born Reidar Horghagen, 7 May 1971) is a Norwegian drummer, formerly for Norwegian black metal band Immortal from 1996 to 2022 and Swedish death metal band Hypocrisy from 2004 until April 2022. Career Horgh joined Immortal in 1996, bring ...

– drums ;Additional personnel * Demonaz Doom Occulta – lyrics

References

{{Authority control Immortal (band) albums 1999 albums Osmose Productions albums Albums produced by Peter Tägtgren Albums with cover art by Jean-Pascal Fournier