Panzerchrist: Maleficium Part 2 - Album Review
Panzerchrist’s Maleficium Part 1 was the opening barrage, a blunt, bruising statement that reminded everyone this Danish institution still knows how to flatten a skyline. Maleficium Part 2 arrives as the finishing strike: smarter movement, deadlier angles, and a colder sense of purpose.
It completes the double-album arc with eight tracks that deepen the band’s witchcraft narrative while widening their instrumental creativity: burst-fire tempos, doom-laden slow burns, threads of melody and synth texture, and a vocal performance that stalks. The result is a record that reads like a final rite and a fresh start at once.
From an underground perspective, and our readers know this is where we live, albums that try to “finish a concept” often bloat. Maleficium Part 2 does the opposite. It compresses the story into movements you can feel in your neck and chest: persecution, grief, moral rot and the modern reflections of those old bonfires. It’s the rare blackened death album that balances impact and intent without slipping into theatrics.
First Impressions
Opener Witchfinder General feels like the doors being kicked in. The guitars lock to the kick drums with that Panzerchrist snap we all recognise, then pull a neat trick: the chorus widens rather than narrows, letting a scorched melody thread through the blasts. It is not pretty; it is persuasive.
Harmbidder follows with a squat, muscular riff that seems engineered for live set dominance, the kind of pattern that turns crowds into a single organism. If Part 1 sometimes felt like a single, relentless pressure system, the first two strikes of Part 2 prove the band are playing with pressure differentials now.
Hex Maleficium Pex is the turning point. Two minutes in, the tempo drops and a doomed, melodic figure opens like a bruise. It changes how the violence lands when the speed returns. The pacing here is masterful, the arrangement breathes, and Ahl’s phrasing takes on an incantatory weight that sells the lyric without relying on studio tricks.
Catalyst of Chaos and Suffer My Fury keep the middle act tight and hostile, one leaning into strafing runs, the other into a hateful mid-tempo that lets the drums punch holes in the mix. On Walpurgis Night stretches to six minutes and earns every second, folding apocalyptic doom passages into the black-death chassis until the whole track feels ritual, not just aggressive. The closing pair Black Mirror and The Descent funnel the record’s themes into a final sprint and a grim curtain fall.
Performance
A Panzerchrist record lives and dies by the drum chair, and Ove Lungskov plays like a tactician. Blasts are there, plenty of them, but it’s the footwork and accent placement that make songs hit in 3D. The quick step-outs into half-time give Ahl room to loom; the tumbling fills keep the guitars from feeling grid-locked. Tue Madsen’s mix lets the snare thud, not slap, which is crucial, the fast sections retain mass rather than collapsing into click-track ephemera.
On guitar, Frederik O’Carroll and Danny Bo Pedersen are writing motifs rather than just patterns. You can hum the spine of Witchfinder General after a first pass; the descending figure in Hex Maleficium Pex returns like a curse; On Walpurgis Night uses harmonised shapes that feel almost ceremonial. There are flecks of synth and atmospheric layering across the record, but they function like ash in the air: texture that sells the scene, never the lead character.
Sonja Rosenlund Ahl deserves a paragraph to herself. Her control is the album’s binding agent. The diction is iron-edged, which keeps lyrics intelligible even at speed, and she slides from serrated fry to a lower, throatier bark without losing projection. There is theatrical intent here, the album’s witch-trial scaffolding is hard to miss, but she avoids camp by treating each line as proclamation rather than dialogue. It’s one of those performances that reads “front-person” in capital letters without ever overshadowing the songs.
Production and Atmosphere
Antfarm Studios has long been a safe pair of hands for European extremity, and Madsen gives Part 2 the kind of clarity that helps riffs behave like arguments rather than weather. Guitars have teeth but not the glassy sheen that kills menace; the bass is present enough to thicken the midrange and mean enough to keep the double-kick passages from floating. Most importantly, the mastering leaves headroom. Turn this up and the room grows; it doesn’t crumble. For a record that toggles between blast and doom, that dynamic honesty matters.
Theme and Concept
The Maleficium story is not a history lesson; it’s a pressure test for the present. The lyrics return to witch-trial imagery, but the focus is persecution as a system, who benefits, who burns, and how quickly mobs rediscover their taste for smoke. Ahl’s lines scan as denunciations and invocations.
That approach lets the album feel cinematic without resorting to interludes or narration. You can follow the arc from accusation (Witchfinder General) to mass psychosis (Catalyst of Chaos), through the rite itself (Hex Maleficium Pex) to collective, bitter memory (The Descent).
Part 1 vs Part 2: What Changed, What Didn’t
We said in our Part 1 write-up that the album delivered “pure, punishing black metal” and that a touch more variation could have made the experience more engaging. Part 2 answers that critique without softening the blow.
The core traits remain, relentless drumming, hostile riff architecture, but the band begin playing with contrast: more pronounced drops into doomed tempos, melodic counters that jab rather than soothe, and arrangement choices that leave air for hooks to set. If Part 1 was the blunt weapon, Part 2 is the sharpened edge. Together, they read as one work: a double-album that opens with impact and closes with control.
The HMC Verdict
Maleficium Part 2 is the rare follow-up that both amplifies and refines. It hits harder than Part 1 because it carries more contrast; it sticks longer because its hooks are built to survive. The old Panzerchrist strengths are intact, war-drum tightness, serrated riff logic, a whiff of sulphur, but the band have learned the value of tension and release. And with Ahl’s voice shaping the narrative like a ritual officiant, the album’s witch-hunt lens burns through cliché into something colder and more human.
From where we sit at the Heavy Metal Citadel, that combination is what puts Part 2 in the “year-end shortlist” conversation. It is not the noisiest record you’ll hear in 2025. It is the one that keeps stepping back into the room after you think it has finished with you.
