Serena Cherry is best known as the driving force behind Svalbard, one of the most vital and emotionally devastating bands in British metal. The phrase ‘solo project’ might make you expect a smaller and more intimate sound, but that doesn’t apply to Noctule. Extinguish They Flame is an enormous, face-pounding, balls-to-the-wall black power metal album that operates at ten or above for virtually its entire runtime.

Layering guitars upon guitars upon guitars to sound like a massive distorted orchestra, Serena Cherry is clearly having the time of her life. Svalbard, particularly in their later work, thrived on contrast, focusing on the difference between peaks and troughs, the crushing weight of real human experience, boredom, banality, betrayal, and the mundane cruelties of everyday life. Noctule operates at the opposite extreme, taking inspiration from the fantasy video game Elden Ring. While you don’t need to have played the game to appreciate this face-kicking metal record with guitar melodies soaring in every direction, the shift in stakes are life and death at a mythic scale rather than a personal one. The themes of betrayal, abandonment and fortitude are the same ones Cherry has always written about, but here they’re heightened and fantastical, freed from the weight of the everyday.

Welcome to Limgrave opens with ninety seconds of contemplative instrumentation before Devour The Gods arrives, epic and relentless power thrash. Lord of Blood is head-nodding and triumphant, feeling vast enough to fill an arena whilst Grafted opens with strings and Danny Elfman-style piano runs evoking Halloween fright night soundtracks before erupting. Goddess of Rot is spacious, lumbering and mournful, and Become My Blade Once More is the most thrilling track with layers and layers of shredding evoking what a massive orchestra would have done in a prior century but with distorted guitars instead of strings.

Serena’s voice is central. Twenty years ago Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy stood out as a terrifying presence, one of the only women on earth producing such a visceral and extreme roar on a big stage. Now there’s a whole generation thriving, and alongside the professional impressiveness of Cherry’s deep bellowing roar she lets her voice crack and collapse at points through sheer passion. This stops the record from feeling clinical or overproduced despite all the layers of effects-laden instrumentation around it, with a rawness underneath the grandeur that keeps everything human.

Hallowhorn Grounds closes the album with a final track of more than five minutes that’s very reminiscent of the last tracks from Svalbard, with a grand, uplifting and satisfying end. If Extinguish Thy Flame was the product of a large professional team it would still be impressive, but knowing that it’s essentially one woman sitting in front of a computer with a guitar until the tracks become enormous changes the context of this record. Assumptions carried within the phrase solo project are obliterated completely. Noctule is designed to be limitless, exhilarating and uninhibited, drawing on power metal, fantasy metal, and the kind of nerd-adjacent cheesy stuff that extreme metal purists look down on. By embracing all of it without apology the record feels vivid and colourful rather than grey and blue.

Every track on Extinguish Thy Flame is based on a boss fight from Elden Ring, and other than two brief interludes every single track is aiming for a different shade of grandeur, all different colours, all of them epic and none of them intimate. Each track is its own boss fight, and the album is a dream project made purely for its own sake, because Cherry loves making this kind of music. The technology that allows one musician to sit at a computer and conjure an enormous, cinematic world is not unlike that which makes epic video games possible, and the record is rooted in soundtrack instincts rather than circle pits and breakdowns.

The common noctule is a small and arguably cute creature, associated with darkness but not exactly terrifying. Extinguish Thy Flame feels like Lord Dracula himself, eight feet tall and absolutely furious. The same melodic instinct, passion and drive of Svalbard but operating in a different lane at an otherworldy and fantastical scale.