Concert Review
ARTIST: Eihwar
DATE: September 14 2026
VENUE: The Complex
SUPPORTING ACT: FRAYLE
CITY: Salt Lake City, Utah
There are sounds that don’t just enter your ears. They hit the soft machinery behind your ribs like a round from a large-caliber rifle stopped by a Kevlar plate. The vest does its job. You’re still standing. But the kinetic force spreads out in a perfect, ugly bloom across your chest and you feel every cracked rib and every bruised organ screaming that something ancient just tried to kill you and failed. That is Viking folk music when it is done right. Not the cleaned-up festival version. The real thing. The kind that smells like wet leather, woodsmoke, and blood under the fingernails.
I used to chase that feeling with bagpipes. Nothing else in my youth could open the vein of pure, useless melancholy the way a lone piper could. Then the show Vikings happened, and Wardruna, and Heilung, and Eivør, and suddenly the old northern gods had a new frequency. The pipes still work, but the northern sound hits different. It doesn’t ask permission. It just arrives, plants its feet in the center of your sternum, and starts rearranging the furniture.
Months ago an email landed about a French duo called Eihwar. The reply came back cold: they don’t do interviews in English. I kept them on the radar anyway. Then the tour dates arrived, and a live clip, and I watched this woman named Asruun speaking to a crowd in a language that felt older than the country she was standing in. French. Of course they were French. The northern spirit has never been particularly interested in national borders. I told the promoter I’d cover the show and that I’d interview them in French if they’d have me. The whole night already felt charged, like the air before a summer storm that knows exactly where it’s going to land.
The venue was still holding the last heat of the day when I walked in. Outside the air had finally cooled, but inside it was thick and close. I passed the merch table and felt that familiar small grief of not being made of money. Beautiful death-metal fonts on the vinyl, black shirts that looked like they could stop a blade, CDs that promised rituals. The crowd was already half-transformed. Leather strip skirts. Braided beards thick enough to hide small animals. Face paint that looked like it had been applied with fingers instead of brushes. Bones hanging from belts. These people hadn’t come to watch. They had come to participate.
FRAYLE
The stage was dressed in low chandelier light, the kind that makes everything look like it’s happening underwater. A guitarist appeared in a heavy hood that erased his face. A drummer took position. A woman on bass with her face painted the color of wet ash. And the singer, veiled like a Nordic witch, wearing a crown that glowed with its own private electricity. I knew before the first note that this was not going to be polite.
They opened with a minor-key assault that would have made Megadeth check their watches. The bass and guitar hit like fists through drywall. The singer’s voice cut through it clean and sharp, no theatrical growling, no cheap theatrics. Just pure, controlled darkness. One minute and thirty-five seconds into the first song I already belonged to them.
They moved through their set like people who understood the assignment. “Treacle & Revenge” arrived as a dark Disney nursery rhyme that had gone feral in the woods and come back with blood on its teeth. Then “Summertime Sadness,” delivered with the slow, dangerous flirtation of someone who knows exactly how much damage they can do with a smile. The whole set was short, but it never once diluted itself. No compromise. No drift into the tired theatrics that have infected so much dark metal these last years. Just pure delivery of pain and beauty in equal measure.
Afterward I found the bassist at the merch table. Scottish, living in Cleveland because that’s where the band lives. I told her I was sorry about Cleveland and that we were kindred in the old blood. She laughed like someone who has heard that joke before and still finds it true. I told the singer they were the best dark metal band out of Cleveland, better than Nine Inch Nails, better than Slipknot, and I meant every word. She took the compliment the way people take a blade when they know it’s not pointed at them.
EIHWAR
Then the lights died.
When they came back up, the stage belonged to something older. Marc stood there in a helmet that completely erased his face, a silhouette carved out of shadow and iron. Asruun wore a wolf skull over her head like a crown that still remembered the kill. The parts of her face not covered by bone were painted into something beautiful and dangerous at the same time. Animal bones hung from her belt and clicked softly against each other every time she moved. The air in the room changed. You could feel the temperature drop half a degree just from the silence they carried with them.
They opened with “Heill Óðinn.” Marc began a low, ritual chant that sounded like it had been dragged up from the bottom of a well. Asruun answered with her drum and her voice, and every person in the room who had brought their own skin drum answered with them. The sound was immediate and physical. It wasn’t music anymore. It was a summons. The room filled with the sound of hands striking hide, and for a moment it felt like the walls themselves were trying to answer.
Then “Skjaldmö.” Marc barked the words in that old, bursty style that sits halfway between speech and animal. Asruun’s voice rode over it like smoke over fire. The crowd’s drums never stopped. People were already moving, not dancing so much as being moved. The energy was primeval, barely human, the kind of urge that lives in the spine and doesn’t care what your conscious mind thinks about it.
While Asruun was dancing and beating her drum, and singing in an angelic tone, the kind you think you would hear in battle as the angles arrive to take you into whatever afterlife you believe in, Marc lead a drum circle from the stage, beating his skins and leading us all in chants “WHOOO!!! HAAAAAAA” as if he was the taskmaster keeping sync and we were all the warriors rowing the tribe ships across the cold waters. Yeah, it felt just like that, not cosplay, we were really doing all of this together.
Somewhere in the middle of “Viking War Trance” I realized I could hear the bones on Asruun’s belt striking each other in time with the music. That small, dry clicking became part of the rhythm. Her voice stayed impossibly clear through all of it, calm and terrifying in the same breath, carrying the old northern songs into a room full of modern bodies that had temporarily forgotten what century they belonged to.
When “Ragnarök” hit, the entire room locked into the same pulse. I watched a woman named Emily, dressed almost identically to Asruun, lead a chaotic pagan dance circle in the middle of the floor. It looked completely unplanned and completely inevitable. Asruun herself was moving with a pair of swords, the blades catching the low light as she turned. Emily later told me she was part of a local pagan dance troupe. That explained the circle. It didn’t explain how natural it felt, like the room had been waiting for exactly this shape of movement.
They barely paused for breath. Marc shouted “Hugrheim!” and the drums dropped low enough for Asruun’s voice to take the whole space. There was something almost joyful in the way she sang it, pure expression without apology. In the spaces between the words I only half-understood, the room felt like it had slipped sideways into some older ritual. We weren’t an audience anymore. We were the congregation.
“The Forge” arrived with an electronic pulse underneath the ancient chanting. Marc had found that deep throat technique the Tibetan monks use, and he used it like a weapon. The combination of electronic groove, bone drums, and that low, vibrating chant made the entire room feel like a single organism sweating around a fire that existed only in the collective nervous system. When the song ended, people looked at each other like they had just survived something together.
By the time they reached “Ljósgarðr” the lyrics had become secondary. I stopped trying to track the language. It didn’t matter. The meaning was already in the body.
Before the last song Asruun spoke to the crowd. The drum she had been playing would be for sale. She had a short interview right after the set and then she would come to the merch table. Then they closed with “Berserkr,” the song about men who put on the skin and skull of the bear, took the old hallucinogens, and stepped into a state where the animal and the human stopped being separate things. The term “berserk” comes from exactly that practice. True story. The room knew it. You could feel it in the way people moved.
After the final note I walked with them toward the green room, speaking French, joking with Marc and the manager. I may or may not have seen Marc’s face without the helmet. Some mysteries are better left intact. We did a short interview in French (the subtitled version is linked elsewhere). I got the poster signed. The whole exchange felt like the natural aftermath of the ritual rather than a separate professional obligation.
My brother and a handful of friends who chase this kind of music have always said the best of these shows feel like church. Not the polite, Sunday version. The older kind. The kind where the gods are not metaphors and the body is the only altar that matters. Tonight was one of those nights. If Eihwar comes through your city, go. If you can find leather and braids and face paint, wear them. The music will meet you halfway, but it meets you harder if you arrive already half-transformed.
Some experiences don’t ask to be reviewed. They ask to be survived and then reported from the other side with the bruises still visible. This was one of them.
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