Empyrium

An atmosphere-laden German folk/doom metal outfit established in 1994 by Markus Stock under the alias Ulf Theodor Schwadorf, Empyrium has explored various strains within the style, ranging from symphonic death metal to mystical, nature-oriented neo-folk. Its introduction came with the shadowy and pastoral Wintersunset in 1996, after which the project pursued a denser yet equally somber direction on later works such as Turn of the Tides (2014) and Über den Sternen (2021).

The initial pair of full-length releases, Wintersunset (1996) and Songs of Moors and Misty Fields (1997), appeared on the German dark metal imprint Prophecy Productions—the second of these being the then-new label’s debut offering—and gravitated more toward the neo-folk and symphonic metal side of the palette. The 1999 album Where at Night the Wood Grouse Plays marked a predominantly acoustic turn for the group, a path also followed by the ambitious 2002 effort Weiland, a German-language concept album following a run of English-language recordings. Not long after that release Empyrium entered a period of inactivity, though it surfaced again with the 2006 career retrospective Retrospective, which included remastered selections alongside two fresh tracks and a re-recorded piece from the debut. Prophecy Productions revealed in 2010 that the band planned to reconvene in the studio; the outcome was Turn of the Tides, issued in 2014 and merging the ethereal folk elements of prior work with a weightier, more doom-oriented approach, marking the first studio album in twelve years. The live recording Into the Pantheon, captured in 2011 at the Wave Gotik Treffen inside the Pantheon of Volkspalast Leipzig, Germany, emerged in 2017, while the full-length Über den Sternen arrived in 2021.