Review: Meresin – Anthems of Hatred

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 1st May 2026 The second record from Poland’s Meresin promises to be a big step up from their 2021 debut ‘Black Messiah’, taking that album’s industrial and symphonic black metal blueprint and slowly enriching it over the past five years into something bigger, grander and more impressive. ‘Anthems of Hatred’ is out now through Via Nocturna, and focuses on the enraging tendency of humanity towards hypocrisy in all its forms. Polish black metal has a storied history and some high watermarks that it seems unfair to expect bands to live up to. But Meresin are here to do their best, and opener ‘Wake Up’ leads from grandiose symphony and choral voices into dark, atmospheric black metal fury. There’s a vast richness to the sound that Meresin inhabit; a densely woven tapestry of darkness shared by fiery black metal and haunting, almost gothic moments of atmospheric bliss. It never reaches the overwrought heights of Behemoth or Dimmu Borgir, but there is a…