Swedish Black Metal. Should need no introduction. Third album from 2002, with Hellhammer on drums.

So many black metal bands out there take the Darkthrone approach to song craft that the appeal of fully exploring a repetitive riff in a song often looses its power to the listener. Bands that spend entire songs making the tiniest changes as a dark riff is repeated hypnotically have become a genre of their own, and this album certainly falls in that category. However, like the better moments of Judas Iscariot, this Shining album sculpts singular towers of dark and powerful repetitive riffage. There is a purity and strength that resonates in me with such minimalist music, as 6 minute songs that contain 3 or even 2 riffs wash over the listener: appealing simultaneously with the primal hypnotic parts of the brain as it engages the careful listener with a complex latticework of changes and iterations.