And on the eighth day, the Lord bringeth Golgothor, casting unto His righteous flock the Grava Sutra, a sacrament of prophetic doom, banishment, and spilt bong water.

The Finnish city of Vantaa nests in the Helsinki sprawl, an international airport in its gut, a working-class culture in its heart. Logistically designed, this warehouse metropolis moves bodies and freight, its long commutes and industrial transits a capitalistic postcard for the CEO who enjoys the fruits of his business from afar. Vantaa can be soul crushing. Doom metal knows what to do with a crushed soul.

The Golgothor story begins amid the hardhat clutter of the Fazar Makeiset Oy factory floor. Kalle Virtanen (guitar/vocals) drives a forklift. Kai Koskinen (guitar/vocals) runs the loading dock. Eppu Rosberg (bass) is the clipboard man, check-boxing tasks in a waking slumber as he conjures gnarly songwriting subjects. And drummer Kalle Nieminen, he’s a production line worker. Find a foreign object in your Marianne mints… blame Kalle.

“Eppu recognized me from my other band and asked if I want to form a new band. I said no. I knew the two Kalles from playing around, and they wanted to form a band too. Still I say no. I was happy with my band. Now Golgothor exists anyway.”

— Kai Koskinen

ONE RIFF WIDE. ELEVEN FATHOMS DEEP. FIVE MEN DOWN.

It’s been long understood that the bleak Finnish landscape, shrouded in darkness for months at a time, makes an exquisite theatre to conjure deep, down-tuned riffs. Finland has a long relationship with funeral doom, Kaarina’s Thergothon the undisputed overlords of the doom metal sub-genre. Their treacle approach to drop Z tuning in the early 1990s paved way for acts like Skepticism, Shape of Despair, and Swallow the Sun, while traditional doomsters Spiritus Mortis are widely cited as the nation’s earliest doom act. These are cornerstones of that same bleak landscape, and the Golgothor sound is scattered amongst.

The band’s tagline, One riff wide, eleven fathoms deep, five men down, serves not only as a poke at their restrictive chord template, but pays homage to Koskinen’s maternal grandfather, a Norwegian whaler who perished in the Barents sea in 1997, a weighted corpse not since located. The fifth Golgothor member gets a nod too — Sandels Kallo (Sandels the Skull) is named after Johan August Sandels, a Swedish general who led the Swedish fifth brigade in Eastern Finland during the Battle of Koljonvirta in 1808. His decisive victory over a much larger Russian front saved Finland from converting their alphabet to Cyrillic. Sandels the Skull, by the way, is a plastic skull on a stick.

Golgothor’s debut album, Grava Sutra, exists somewhere along these eastern plains, drowning with salt in the esophagus and an icebox to keep the body fresh. Some might call this motif a heavy metal cliche; Kai Koskinen calls it brand recognition.

“We can’t very well market ourselves wearing pastel shirts on a picnic blanket.”

— Kai Koskinen

Perhaps the most marketable Grava Sutra track is the six-minute Permission to Banish, a polished, descending dirge, heaping scorn upon authoritarian doctrine in the guise of maintaining safety, complete with Gregorian chants and bong-ripping sound effects. Here, the language here is domestic and blunt:

We lit the torch we dropped the veil

Strike the bell with coffin nail

Silent prayers beneath the rite

Banishment becomes our right

The outlook shaped the air is squeezed

The crown of thorns around your feet

The sky denies you any name

But dust absolves you just the same

In Finnish folklore, the gods often keep their distance, while the dead stay loud. As with Grava Sutra — a low-fog album trudging on Eastern European mythology, mysticism, and bodily consequence. Opening track Reversum adheres to that lineage. Built on a reverse-Fibonacci syllable count a la Tool’s Lateralus, we here of a once bold god unveiling himself with hellfire command, only to recede into insignificance with each tightening line.

Songs of whaling (Spiral of the Flensed) farming (The Idle Scythe and The Dusting) and hallucinogenic sacrament (Every Rip a Steeple and The Plant Who Swallowed) lend Grava Sutraa point of difference in a doom-metal world where Lucifer is king and a black-and-white color scheme is mandatory.

Flensing is a whaling term: stripping flesh from a carcass, the very method once executed by Koskinen’s grandfather. On Spiral of the Flensed, Golgothor turn that notion inward, to their own bodies, minds, and ultimately, the hive mind.

The Idle Scythe — the album’s crustiest, most sphincter pinching track — speaks of a death tool left unused. As the seasons pass and the fields grow wild, the scythe awaits, hanging, rusting. The wait is the violence.

But it is the album closer, title track Grava Sutra that steals the show. Based on a fictional tome created by bassist Eppu Rosberg, the Grava Sutra is a “How-to book dedicated to the philes who fondle the cold angels”. Work that out for yourself. Such as the act of necrophilia, the thirteen-minute track is a long plummet into immorality. The subjects of thorns, bells and angels are dealt with swiftly, shoved aside for the big ticket item, fucking a corpse. According to the Grava Sutra, this act conjures “The elixir extracted from the tunnels of the rotting, to petition the rise of the frotting.” Sonically, this paragon for the sexually depraved wanders with black whimsy and embalmed lust, bridging the antithetical part one and part two with an awkward pause. Apt.

Yes, indeed it is a cold, bleak place, Vantaa. But if such a disheartening clime can forge the systems to feed and move the human vessel, then the sludge of industry must be the elixir extracted from the tunnels within, to petition the rise of thee ultimate vessel, thee righteous Golgothor. The industrial revolution didn’t happen in the heat, as doom metal has re-risen, embedded in the cold, dead hell of the Fazar Makeiset Oy factory floor.

Grava Sutra is available on V. Vein Records via the Golgothor Bandcamp page, and includes hi-resolution PDF documents of the front and back covers, gatefolds, inner-sleeve visuals, and a limited edition poster.

Don’t forget to check out our Riff Transmission segment featuring Kai Koskinen exclusive to our Patreon.

Golgothor’s Instagram is awesome.