GREEN CARNATION – A Dark Poem, Part II: Sanguis (Album Review)

Green Carnation is a band hellbent on making up for lost time. With nearly a decade and a half between their fifth and sixth albums, and five between the sixth and seventh, this Norwegian collective is set to deliver both parts two and three of their Dark Poem trilogy in 2026, with the apparent aim of dropping the entire set within about a year. We’ve seen other bands make similar moves in decades past, and Green Carnation apparently took studious notes to avoid the mistakes Metallica and Guns n Roses made in the 90s. The Dark Poem albums have fewer – and much stronger – songs.

In their previous life, Green Carnation made it a point to travel in varying directions with each record and delivered stunningly excellent output while doing so. Since their reformation, however, they’ve opted to explore the progressive doom that earned them acclaim with Light of Day, Day of Darkness a good quarter century ago, though they’ve shied away from penning any more hourlong opuses this time around. And that’s completely fine – Leaves of Yesteryear was more than a commendable comeback album, and the Dark Poem trilogy is shaping up to be a leaner, more precise, and more biting iteration of that facet.

Notably absent from Sanguis is founder/ guitarist Terje “Tchort” Schei, who in recent weeks has returned from a short leave of absence. This continues what seems to be a revolving cast of musicians who make Green Carnation more of a collective than a band – Schei, fellow guitarists Bjørn Harstad and Michael Krumins, and keyboardists Endre Kirkesola and Kenneth Silden seem to cycle in and out depending on availability, while longtime singer Kjetil Nordhus, longtime bassist Stein Roger Sordal, and newish drummer Jonathan Pérez hold the fort down, with the former two handling damn near all of songwriting duties as of late. While certainly an unconventional approach to maintaining a band, A Dark Poem, Part II: Sanguis is a solid argument in favor of this practice. It’s brief as far as Green Carnation records go, and like most of this band’s catalog, it’s damn good.

The title track greets us with Kirkesola’s very deliberately retro-sounding organ juxtaposed with Pérez’s very deliberately metal drumming before that familiar chugging and that always-welcome croon dispels doubt that this is indeed a Green Carnation record. Everything that has defined the band’s current approach – unapologetic doom with 70s progressive flair – not only shines on its own merit, but it proves to be the ideal conduit for the bleak resolve of Sordal’s gut-wrenching lyrics, where he vows to break the chains of generational trauma.

While there is much to be said in favor of the argument that there is no better person to sing such personal lyrics than the person who penned them, singers like Nordhus make a more than compelling counterpoint. While his delivery never lacks, performances such as “Sanguis” (Latin for both “blood” and “descent”) leave me no choice other than to believe his imposing stature doubles as a reservoir for the anguish his bandmates commit to paper, as if his work on Light of Day, Day of Darkness, which Tchort wrote while grieving the death of his young daughter, didn’t imply that in spades over two decades ago. Those who foolishly harbor doubts need only hear the agony in Nordhus’ voice as he delivers the lines “Father, I do realize that the cards you were given destroyed you… In the light of life, I will not follow you.”

“Loneliness Untold, Loneliness Unfolds,” a 100% clean and brooding “acoustic” cut that features Sordal taking the lead vocal in Green Carnation for the first time since the burden was his alone, is something of a throwback to 2006’s absolutely essential The Acoustic Verses. Though not nearly as punishing as that older cut, which has reduced me to a weeping mess on multiple occasions, this isn’t the intent of “Loneliness.” Its purpose is not to inspire grief, but to provoke despair, and this unpretentious four-minute dirge delivers on that promise. “Sweet To the Point of Bitter,” on the other hand, is heavy to the point of crushing, demonstrating over the course of nearly six minutes that doom can be so much more than the sludge its detractors often accuse it of being.

“I Am Time” continues in this vein, recalling the afflicted glory of “Writings on the Wall” in that tortured reprise as well as Green Carnation’s black metal roots in that tense, trem-picked interlude. And like most well-crafted epics, these songs end without the listener realizing how much time they devour.

The politically-charged “Fire in Ice,” one of the obvious centerpieces of the album, is another similarly structured song that embodies the decades-old promise of “epicus doomicus metallicus” (an album which coincidentally was written by Candlemass’s own bassist, and which nearly included a song called “Dark Reflections”). Every second of this song builds on the second before it, and it is peppered with riffs and melodies that, while unassuming on their own, are layered so expertly as to wring the last breath of life from even more unassuming listeners. I cannot wait to hear this cut live.

Sanguis takes its final bow with another song that would not have felt out of place on The Acoustic Verses. The fully unplugged “Lunar Tale”  is without question the most gentle, touching, and heart-wrenching song Green Carnation have committed to tape since they reformed in 2014, and even with the eerily suicidal closing line “sunlight, you’re better off without me/ Moonlight, with me gone, you’ll be free,” offers a glimmer of hope to conclude an album that can otherwise only be described as bleak.

Tchort teased a trilogy, of which Light of Day, Day of Darkness would be the first installments, called The Chronicles of Doom that would follow The Acoustic Verses. It never came to be, and it might never come to be, but I cannot shake the suspicion that the Dark Poem trilogy might be the spiritual successor to the trilogy that never was. Green Carnation have boiled their current identity down to its very essence on this excursion, and while a part of me will never stop wondering what could have been, I’ll never stop being grateful that these are the fruits we reap from that regrettable dissolution.

Release Date: April 3rd, 2026
Record Label: Season Of Mist
Genre: Progressive Metal

Musicians:

• Kjetil Nordhus / Vocals
• Jonathan Perez / Drums
• Stein Roger Sordal / Bass
• Bjørn Harstad / Guitars
• Endre Kirkesola / Keys

A Dark Poem, Part II: Sanguis Tracklist:

1. Sanguis
2. Loneliness Untold, Loneliness Unfolds
3. Sweet to the Point of Bitter
4. I am Time
5. Fire in Ice
6. Lunar Tale

Order the album here.