The Icelanders have a shelf for books shaped like this. Njáls saga. Egils saga. Laxdæla saga — a name in the genitive, then the word saga, and you know before you open it that a life is going to be told all the way from beginning to consequence. Hrafnablót have called their debut album Guðlaugar saga. That is not a title. That is a claim, made with an entirely straight face, by six people from Reykjavík whose band is two years old.

Then you look at the sleeve, and the claim gets stranger. A woman rides a black Icelandic horse along a black beach, turf house smoking behind her, wet green mountains above — and in her raised hand, crackling blue, is a taser.

That picture is the whole record. Guðlaugar saga follows Guðlaug, a modern woman thrown back into the settlement age with nothing but the clothes she stands in and one badly anachronistic weapon, through battle, feasting, abduction and fate, to a choice: go home, or stay and bend history out of shape. Nine tracks, forty-eight minutes — and two of them are not songs at all, but spoken pieces. A seer's prophecy in Spádómurinn. A chieftain counting the cost after the fighting in Kappar, Meyjar, Komendur. The old sagas did exactly that: they stopped dead, and somebody spoke a verse.

The third single came on 21 August, and it is the darkest thing the band have shown so far. "Heljarhlíð" — Hel's hillside, the slope that goes down and does not come back up — runs six minutes and twenty-two seconds.

It is also where the record first bares its teeth. The two earlier singles, Svartigaldur and Dísablót, stayed with Hugrún Hanna Stefánsdóttir's clean voice; this one is flagged by the band as the first appearance of harsh vocals — and they come from Ólafur Daði Jónsson, who otherwise plays the keyboards. That detail is worth more than it looks: this is a band, not a project. The guitars lean melodic death rather than folk here, and the descent resolves, at the last, into stacked vocal harmonies. Four of the six members sing backing vocals. This is the song where you find out why.

The video deserves its own paragraph, and so does the fact that the band made it themselves: bassist Þórgnýr Einar Albertsson directed, shot and cut it, with Hugrún Hanna on creative direction. It is in black and white. No horse, no gown, no taser — two singers alone on an Icelandic lava field under a flat grey sky, moss and broken rock out to the horizon, the wind doing most of the staging. After all that gold and magenta on the album cover it lands like a cold hand on the neck. Whoever decided the sleeve would be colour and the video would be stone got it right.

Hrafnablót formed in Reykjavík in the autumn of 2024 and describe themselves as sorcerous folk metal, which reads like press copy until you start translating. The band name is raven-blót: a sacrifice. The eleven-minute closer, Örlagavegur, is the road of fate. They are not being decorative. Helgi Durhuus mixed the record and Lasse Lammert mastered it; the artwork is by Julie Lochridge. There is no label. This is six Icelanders paying for their own saga.

"We want to give listeners a sonic journey inspired by Icelandic nature and folklore, harsh, fragile, intimate, and always beautiful."

The Saga must be honest, though. One single is not an album, and this one is a debut carrying a great deal on its back. The labels stacked against Hrafnablót's name — folk, symphonic, gothic, viking, melodic death, with a stated debt to NWOBHM somewhere in the mix — are a lot of promises for forty-eight minutes to keep, and a concept record reaching that wide can arrive sounding like a compilation with a plot summary stapled to it. Two spoken interludes across nine tracks is a bold ratio; get the pacing wrong and they are speed bumps rather than stops. And "Heljarhlíð", for all its weight, is a first entrance into harsh territory. It proves the band can go there. It does not yet prove they can live there.

But ambition this specific does not turn up every year: an Icelandic-language concept album about a woman who brings a taser to the tenth century, made and paid for by six people in Reykjavík with nobody standing behind them. Guðlaugar saga is out on 11 September. The slope goes downhill from here — and that, in this tradition, has always been the interesting direction.

Pre-order on Bandcamp, or follow the band at hrafnablot.is.