Thromdarr Midwinter Frost - Complete Demo Tapes 1990-1997

he final decade of the last millennium was a significant period for the birth of Finnish extreme metal. In the late 1980s, speed metal found its way into the country, and was immediately followed by thrash metal. Afterwards, death and black metal bands started to pop up in every nook and cranny. Some of those rose to an international fame, while others stayed in the shadows waiting for their turn. Through the years, Svart Records has already brought to light many lost treasures of the Finnish metal scene. This June it will be the turn of Thromdarr from Riihimäki and their old tapes excavated from the band’s archives.

The story of Thromdarr reaches back to 1989, when the band’s guitarist Mika Kyöstilä formed Nymphomaniac, a precursor to Thromdarr, together with Ari “Ave“ Auvinen. When the band went through a lineup change, they changed their name to Necrobiosis and eventually to Thromdarr in 1991. According to the band, they entered the scene with the punk attitude of learning by doing. They followed the steps of their idols and started to make fast and heavy metal in the vein of Sodom, Destruction, Kreator, Slayer, Possessed, Bathory, Celtic Frost, Sepultura, Obituary, Pestilence and Death.

When the demos and recordings started to pile up, the musical taste of the band members started to evolve into a more brutal direction.

-“We played the demo to our friends with great excitement and were often told we sound more like black metal than death metal. We didn’t mind this since we had already embarked on that direction and had face paint on the first band photos. We developed the name Thromdarr ourselves and it was supposed to sound phonetically like thunder”, the band’s frontman Kyöstilä recounts.

Early on in their career, Thromdarr had already played with many renowned metal acts, such as Barathrum, Sentenced, Archgoat and Demigod. The band took a couple of cassette pressings of their first studio demo As a Wind Cries and ended up selling 500 copies.

On their later demos, Thromdarr made more experimental material from the black metal canvas. On the other hand, going through a lineup change led to the band losing its driving force, the recording pace slowing down and the little live activity falling behind partying. In the end of the millennium, the band became active again and signed a contract with Solistitium Records, releasing their debut album NorthStorm Arrives in 1998

Svart Records has now compiled Thromdarr’s early demos into a single package. Kyöstilä and Svart’s producer Olli Hänninen have barely touched the original soundscape, instead remastering the demos the way they were originally made with all their faults and successes.

-“The tapes haven’t been remixed afterwards. Instead, they sound as primitive as when they were originally released. The material has also been copied from original recordings. Pick up a beer and listen to old school metal!”, Kyöstilä urges.

Svart Records will release Thromdarr’s Midwinter Frost – Complete demo tapes 1990-1997 double LP compilation and CD on the 17th of June 2022.