Once the best-kept secret of the ever-fertile Finnish black metal underground, WARMOON LORD truly made their presence known with 2021's Battlespells. The stage thus set, WARMOON LORD make lateral developments with all-important third album Sacrosanct Demonopathy. On the surface, the foundation is largely the same - pure & proud black metal of a most fantastical nature, even "medieval," but always burning with that icy-hot passion that so fired the second wave during the mythical 1990s - but there's a wider canvas of textures and emotions at play here. The songwriting fires on literally all cylinders - truly, variety is not a dirty word in this context - with each of these eight tracks (QUICKLY) moving in myriad directions, but ones that are increasingly complex and even cathartic; it's not difficult to imagine castle spires continually ascending, so cresting and climactic are Sacrosanct Demonopathy's component songs. What's more, the crisp & effervescent recording heightens the nightsky melodicism to a point where it almost feels paradoxically "bright" - but with stained-glass synths winding in and out of those spires, the darkness widens again and devours the listener in a purple haze. Not surprisingly, then, the central themes to the album are more personal and turned inwards - Satanic fantasy, occultism, destroying ties with the herd, and crucially "creating your own worlds," in Lord Vrajitor's own words - compared to its predecessor's ones of pride, conquering, war, tyranny, and ruling. Wide awake and dreaming is WARMOON LORD here! The trailblazers (or, rather, church-burners) of the '90s eventually went slicker, more "mature" directions as that decade drew to a close. A few were more successful than most, and if such is a foregone conclusion if one writes & performs pure black metal, then WARMOON LORD honorably uphold the exception to the rule with the epic landscape of Sacrosanct Demonopathy!