Therion - "Leviathan III"
The final review of the year!
Therion is, without a doubt, one of the most singular and interesting bands that I follow. And, as this is the first time I’ve covered a release on this platform, I’d like to begin with breaking down what this very unique project actually is.
And, before I do, I have to confess that I don’t actually have many of their songs in regular rotation. Only seven Therion tracks currently live on my primary playlist (out of, as of this writing, 3,925). I just find them incredibly interesting. But when they drop something good, it’s fucking phenomenal. Check out one of my favorites, “The Dreams of Swedenborg”.
Therion was founded the same year I was born — 1987 — as a Death Metal band. Technically, if we’re following the band’s founder, Christofer Johnnson, he founded the band twice — once as Blitzkrieg with an old school friend (Oskar Forss), but that effort was short-lived (broke up in 1988); he refounded the band as Megatherion a few months after the first effort failed, naming the new group after Celtic Frost’s album To Mega Therion.1 Within a year, it seems, the name was shortened to just “Therion”. Forss would also end up joining this new effort after a time, and would remain their drummer for a few years.
The band was already seven years old, and still trying to find their sound, when they signed with Nuclear Blast. And every metalhead knows of Nuclear Blast — basically the metal record label. So it’s no surprise that on their second release with Nuclear Blast’s support (and Therion’s fifth, overall), Therion basically founded what is now, almost thirty years later, one of Metal’s largest and most successful genres: Symphonic Metal.
Yes. Symphonic Metal comes from a Death Metal band’s experimental album: 1996’s Theli. You know what Nightwish was doing in 1996? Forming. Just coming together even as a concept. There are a few other foundational albums and acts credited with doing the explorational and experimental work which proved the concept and paved the way, including an album by an American Christian Thrash group, Believer, if you can believe it, but Therion’s Theli is widely hailed as the first proper Symphonic Metal album.
And Johnsson found that he enjoyed the style so much that the band leaned into it and hasn’t strayed since.
Now, Therion’s style of Symphonic is also very different from the genre which has ultimately evolved from those early efforts. They lean very hard into the operatic and choral elements, often utilizing multiple full choirs on a single album and touring with choirs and orchestras in tow. And the majority of their albums are concept albums — true metal operas which really lean into the opera.
Of course, my issue with harsh vocals bleeds into this — operatic vocals are similarly difficult to understand and absorb, so they often kill any attempt to follow the story. But the musical effect is prettier than harsh vox, at least.
I would be loath not to highlight, however, that the difficulty in properly digesting a Therion release runs much deeper than its surface-level styles. Because of their tendency to lean into Neo-Classical, there are often language switches — choruses in Latin or Greek, for example. Or, if the album or song focuses on the Hindu pantheon, for example, there may be excerpts in Sanskrit, maybe directly cut from the Bhagavad Gita. Because Therion’s material always has something to do with the Divine or the Infernal or the Spiritual. It doesn’t just sound grand for kicks; there’s always something more contained within any given song’s or album’s thematic elements.
Leviathan III is, for its sake, not a concept album. It is the final album in a sort-of revival trilogy for the band. Instead of doing anything like a ‘greatest hits’ collection, Johnsson opted to write a trilogy of new material — three albums in three years — which harkened back to the band’s glory days. And each album would have a different tone or style in focus. Much of the material for all three albums was already written, and Johnsson says that he noticed that a significant portion of the songs were “very direct, very bombastic. Yeah, typical hit songs.” Those became Leviathan; others which were “more dark and melancholic” became Leviathan II; and now Leviathan III has finally arrived, which Johnsson described, back in 2021 as:
And then what was left was a lot of songs that were written spontaneously during this period, some songs that were a little bit more adventurous or experimental. So the third record will be a little bit more odd. We will have some folk music influences, we’ll have some more proggy influences and adventurous songs.
Leviathan III, then, harkens back further than either of the other two albums in this project, going back to the experimental days before finding their Symphonic success. And it delivers on that very well, launching with the hard and heavy riffs of “Ninkigal”, which also contains a blend of operatic and harsh vox. At only three minutes long, it feels like a whirlwind intro before the album settles, heavily and with great intent, into “Ruler of Tamag”.
This second track is very Folk-forward, paring back the instrumentation a bit (by Therion’s standards, anyhow) and telling the story of Erlik, the Turkic God of Death and the Underworld, including segments of Turkish in different parts of the song. While none of the Leviathan albums are true concept albums, every song, on all three releases, deals with some aspect of some culture’s mythology.
The third track on III, for example, deals with the Greek figure Pan. And it does so in a way that really showcases Therion’s flexibility. While I don’t love the pseudo-hard rock stylings present at points in the song, the way the song shifts and adjusts from one movement to the next as it invokes the Greek Chorus in its telling of Pan’s story is mesmerizing.
The album continues in this vein, shifting and changing on each track, with only the core Therion sound really tying the whole thing together. Throughout, there are elements of Power, Prog, Death, Doom, and Thrash, but I also have to point out the Flamenco on “Duende”. Flamenco Metal — how fucking cool is that?
There are a number of very good tracks on Leviathan III. Granted, nothing that is going to compete for my favorite song of the year, but the album has delivered on providing a number of interesting and creative songs that I’m glad to have taken the time to listen to. And if you’re looking for something different and unique, I would encourage you to give this album a listen. It is good enough that, if I had more time left, I would drop it in Teal to let it ‘cook’ a bit. But, as I need to start emptying that bucket, I’m going to go ahead and skip that step.
Rating: Green
“To Mega Therion” is Greek for “The Great Beast”