Review SACRAL NIGHT ‘Le diadème d’argent’

Merciful Fate is on everyone’s lips again at the moment. The King impresses his fans on several festivals this year, among others the Hellfest in France. Whether the five Frenchmen of Sacral Night have not missed this moment is beyond my knowledge. But if you listen to their new disc ‘Le diadème d’argent’, you can’t deny a certain affinity to the music of King Diamond.

Sacral Night hail from Grenoble in the French Alps and started to express their passion for traditional heavy metal in 2017. In the same year of their foundation, they released their first EP ‘Darkness Process’, followed by the 2019 debut album ‘Ancient Remains’.

This caught the attention of No Remorse Records, the Greek label known for its fine sense of good metal. Once the formalities were settled, nothing prevented them from working on ‘Le diadème d’argent’.

The nine songs on the album, all in French, are inspired by King Diamond, but bands like Portrait and In Solitude are also influential factors for the sound of the Frenchmen. This is mainly due to the partly high vocal ranges of singer Antoine Volhard, which often go into falsetto. You have to certainly like this, but it is balanced on ‘Le diadème d’argent’ and is a rather enriching element.

The basic mood on ‘Le diadème d’argent’ is more dark and ominous. Each of the songs contains a certain heaviness and melancholy, which in parts reminds of bands like Tribulation, without copying them.

To sum up, Sacral Night have a good album in the starting blocks. The guys do not hide where their influences are, but still manage to create a certain originality, whereby the French lyrics are certainly not entirely blameless.