Review: Valfreyja – The Rose of Rebirth

Style: Progressive Metal (Mixed Vocals (mostly clean))
Recommended for fans of: Ne Obliviscaris, Nick Johnston, Animals as Leaders
Country: Sweden
Release date: 8 August 2025

Something I love about Rush is they understood the power of restraint. For every prog rock hallmark like “2112,” “Hemispheres,” and “La Villa Strangiato,” they had succinct and purposeful rock bangers that nonetheless did nothing to diminish the band’s impressive musicianship. While an exciting facet of progressive music can come from the “throw everything at the wall” attitude, Lee, Lifeson, and Peart understood first and foremost the importance of strong songwriting. No one cares how many notes you can play, how odd your time signatures, or that you crafted a two-hour musical adaptation of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker if the results sound like a hot mess. Which, in a blunt manner of foreshadowing, brings me to Swedish one-man band Valfreyja, and their four-track EP, The Rose of Rebirth.

Masterminded by David Blomgren, Valfreyja promises “musical storytelling through progressive metal… to tell the story of a cyclical mystery.”¹ A tale of dreams and predestination, parallel worlds and prophecies, where one man’s dream heralds the birth of a scorching apocalypse in which “ashes must replace the horrors of the parallel world.” Portending grand designs, and having never heard of Valfreyja before now, I was curious whether Mr. Blomgren possessed the acumen to execute such tantalizingly esoteric aims. Would this be a prog story for the ages, a’la the “Cygnus X-1” duology—some sleeper hit of a grandiose order to be enjoyed over and over? Or would I be closing the book on this particular musical chapter for good?

Consider the book closed, sealed with arcane wards, and banished to the mirror dimension for safekeeping. One minute into opener “Distant Shores of Silver-Green” and I nearly resigned myself to an early defeat, so besieged were my senses by the grating opening riff—fine enough in its infancy, but which quickly metastasized into the aural equivalent of water torture, scraping against my sensibilities thanks to its frustrating repetition and abrasive placement in the mix. Blomgren’s vocals trip across the instrumentals without any sense of timing or place, adding immediately and immeasurably to the unfolding chaos. The drums fight to create some form of definitive foundation, but too often descend into mindless prog wonkery alongside the rest of the instruments. There are fleeting glimpses of cohesion in the opener, like just after the three-minute mark, where Blomgren’s admittedly decent cleans find a proper alignment with his instrumentation. But too quickly everything plunges back into a primordial flood of disconnected ideas, half-realized snatches of feverish musical dreams fighting to form some kind of cogent reality. To make matters worse, there’s no sense of a throughline across the nine minutes it takes to cross “Distant Shores,” making for one confusing journey that ambles its way into an abrupt fadeout, as if Blomgren had grown bored and decided to simply move on.

None of the remaining three tracks fare much better, content to circle similarly disjointed ideas fuelled by noodling bass, circling guitar lines, and expressive drumming. “The Fountain of Glass” and “The Rose of Rebirth” do find a tad more cohesion in their performances, wherein one can begin to appreciate some of Valfreyja’s efforts (certainly the drumming), but the fact is that nothing short of an entire structural overhaul would be capable of rewriting my initial opinion. If there’s a page to dog-ear in Valfreyja’s book, however, it would be the mix: There’s plenty of space for the vocals and instruments to breathe and be heard, especially the bass. The double-edged sword of that is, of course, that one can more plainly hear when things aren’t working out, which is more often than not. Blomgren also pulls in some harsher influences on closer “King of the Fever Dream,” unloading a bevy of blast beats and black metal rasps across beds of serviceable prog-death riffage—a fun switch-up that nevertheless feels mired in abruptness thanks to a lack of musical foreshadowing in any of the prior tracks. Plot twists are fine so long as we can see the breadcrumbs looking back; otherwise, such attempts risk unmooring the audience and undoing whatever goodwill the decision may have generated.

The Rose of Rebirth feels like a smorgasbord of ideas roughly stitched together, gunning for prog credentials by way of off-time vocal placements and odd song structures within an admittedly alluring narrative surrounding dreams and prophecies. Sadly, Valfreyja lacks the chops necessary to pull off such esoteric approaches. While Blomgren’s vocal style certainly endears itself to this sort of baroque, metaphysical progressive metal, the songwriting gets too lost in the clouds to ever touch ground with the listener. As a terrible band once said, “Every rose has its thorn,” and Valfreyja’s latest is bristling with them. Too many to touch.

Recommended tracks: King of the Fever Dream
You may also like: Vass/Katsionis, Hteththemeth, Locust Leaves, Uncanny
Final verdict: 3/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | RateYourMusic

Label: Independent

Valfreyja is:
– David Blomgren (everything)

1.  Quote found on their Bandcamp page: https://valfreyja.bandcamp.com/album/the-rose-of-rebirth. ↩︎