First, a warning: don’t let the mediocre score put you off. It's there because, in my view, Silence doesn’t quite function as a complete album. But those that give it a chance will find, at least in its best moments, something very worth hearing. Nachtvorst, from Holland, have developed a distinctive sound that deserves an audience, and which is accessible enough to find one.

Accessible that is, despite their length. Six tracks here span 52 minutes; given that two of these are relatively ephemeral interludes, that makes the meat of the album comprises four tracks ranging from just-under-ten to just-under-fifteen minutes in length. This is difficult to pull off convincingly, especially when you are not Opeth and therefore cannot get away with meandering freely from heavy to acoustic idea and back again for extended periods of time. No, Nachtvorst’s songs have a grim focus, squeezing their thuddingly rhythmic motifs for all that they can express. Their music is typically slow doom-laden, with relatively simple riffs or rhythms forming the basis for long explorations that skirt the boundaries between black, gothic and sludge.

The results can be massively powerful. Silence opens with a monstrosity of a track, The Serpent’s Tongue. Here we have a minimalist approach to composition based around a lumbering doom riff, the tempo of which is perfectly calculated at a pulsating slow-to-mid tempo. It worms hypnotically. The crunching sludge guitars drop out after five minutes, but this insistent beat remains unshifted, stripped down to bass, gothic piano plink-plonks and ambient clean guitar noodling. It is a masterclass in the textural manipulation of rhythmic ideas. There is a second highpoint here as well- Nightwinds. It opens with a skidding, stoner-ish riff comparable to Iron Monkey , and in fact it’s around this point that Erghal’s vocals also taking the rasping, strained character of that band’s late singer, Johnny Morrow. But it ends up as something darker, bubbling down into another of those glowering minimalist build-ups, here with a resemblance to the plaintively atmospheric sludge passages on the last Twilight album.

But I did say above that this record lacks something. In the latter stages, the minimalism mentioned above loses some of its effect. Gentle Notice of a Final Breath is somewhat tiresome, based around a fairly mind-numbing bassline which, while perhaps fitting with the song title, gets boring. The harshness of the vocals, a strength elsewhere, feel out of place in this track, which often comes across like a more soporific version of The Gathering’s middle years. And closer A Way of Silence, in my view, does not do enough of interest to merit its quarter-hour length. A shame, because the first half of the record sets a high bar.

Silence is an album of intrigue and power; a genuinely distinctive amalgam of black, doom, sludge and death metals which conjures a diverse set of influences. It’s also a flawed album, promising greater things than can be delivered this time around. The music herein is sometimes gargantuan, but in the record’s latter stages drifts somewhat. In fact, I’d say that we have here about 50% of a really impressive release.