‘Elden Ring’ saved Serena Cherry’s life – so she made an extreme metal album about it

Noctule, the solo project of former Svalbard vocalist Serena Cherry, doesn’t fit neatly into the rules of black metal. Instead of raucous anthems about Satan and the Norse landscape, her upcoming second album ‘Extinguish Thy Flame’ is all about fantasy game Elden Ring – the nightmarish epic filled with scary monsters and snarling beasties that’s sold more than 30million copies since its release in 2022. READ MORE: How ‘Diablo’ continues to provide the definitive dark-fantasy game soundtrack Elden Ring’s sprawling, open-world adventure is soundtracked by sparse, brooding instrumental music – but instead of channeling that, Cherry has smashed together the heavily-distorted, outrageously heavy genre of black metal with the more melodic, but no less forgiving melodeath (AKA melodic death metal) for ‘Extinguish Thy Flame’, which is out September 25. It’s bigger and meaner than Noctule’s ferocious debut, which paid homage to 2011’s nerdy spells, swords and dragons role-playing game Skyrim. “You look at most metal album covers and they look like something from World Of Warcraft, or vice versa,” Cherry tells NME from her living room, surrounded by Noctule vinyl and t-shirts ready to be sen...