The pagan metal nine-piece Heralder hail from Saarland, Germany. After a demo, a promo and an underground sampler, they’ve now presented us with their first full-length album, entitled Twilight Kingdom. The ten tracks have, at the moment of writing, been out in the open for an entire day. Let’s see if I like what I’m about to hear.

Heralder follows in the footsteps of established bands like Cruachan and Falkenbach with songs of folklore, ghosts and wars. There are lots of clean vocals on Twilight Kingdom, taken care of by no less than three singers. We’ve got one screamer / herald and two girls who do the smooth chanting. I don’t hear a significant difference between the voices of the girls and the clean male vocals aren't exactly brought forth by a singing voice. Conclusion: keep the screams and one female vocalist, the whole would sound better that way.
 
The music generally is mid-paced to slow. Heralder is trying to create a mystic atmosphere, yet there are certain factors that keep them from doing so. The aforementioned obsolete vocals are one of them and the crappy sounding guitars are the second. Especially the lead guitars sound immensely fragile and out of place. The keyboards do manage to take care of the mystique, as do the clean guitars. The strange thing is that I’d always rather have the keyboards moved to the background, since they tend to take over an entire song rather quickly. In this case, I’d have liked to hear some more keyboard for reasons mentioned above.

The production needs some work, because although there has been invested time in the writing of songs, the sound comes across as rather cheap. Especially the guitars and the drums do not manage to impress. Add to that the overflow on vocal input and we have enough room for improvement. If you like ‘epic’ bands, you might want to have a listen, though. This could be a record you’d want to have in your collection. As for me, I’ll be listening to the more established bands.