Exercises in Futility

There is a specific kind of record that does not develop so much as it circles, and Exercises in Futility circles harder than anything else in modern black metal. Six tracks, numbered rather than named, each running past six minutes, each built from the same handful of gestures. On paper it is monotonous. In practice it is one of the most gripping albums the genre has produced since the Norwegians stopped setting things on fire.

The riff as an argument

M. writes melodies that always resolve downward. Not dramatically — there are no dive bombs here, no obvious gestures at doom. The riffs simply keep landing a step lower than you expect, and after forty minutes of it the cumulative effect is genuinely oppressive in a way that faster, angrier records never manage. The second track is the clearest demonstration: a figure introduced in the first minute returns four times, transposed slightly further down on each pass, until the last statement sounds like the same melody heard through a floor.

This is why the numbered titles work. Naming these tracks would imply they are about different things. They are not. They are one argument, restated six times, getting worse.

Darkside

The drumming is what elevates this from very good to essential. Most black metal drummers function as a metronome with delusions — blast, fill, blast. Darkside plays against the guitar, dropping accents in the spaces the riff leaves open, switching feel mid-phrase without ever announcing it. On the fifth track he spends nearly two minutes refusing to land on the downbeat, and the tension that creates is almost unbearable by the time the pattern finally resolves.

It is also, crucially, a human performance. You can hear the room. You can hear him getting slightly ahead of himself in the faster passages and pulling back. In a genre that has spent twenty years quantising itself into oblivion, that alone would be worth something.

Production

Clear without being clean. The guitars have body rather than the usual wasp-in-a-jar thinness, the bass is actually audible, and the drums sit forward in the mix where they belong given how much work they are doing. Nothing here is polished — it is simply competent, which in this corner of the genre still reads as a statement.

The problem, such as it is

The album’s commitment to its own thesis is also its only real limitation. There is no relief, no dynamic contrast beyond the local, no track that functions differently from the others. If you are not already inside the record’s logic by minute ten, nothing later will let you in. That is a deliberate choice and I think the right one, but it does mean this is an album you submit to rather than one you enjoy.

Verdict

A masterpiece of restriction. Mgła found one idea, refused to dilute it, and executed it with the kind of discipline that makes most of their contemporaries sound like they were improvising. Ten years on it has not aged a day, largely because it never tried to sound current in the first place.