Band:	Prognan
Album:	Sve Će To Narod Pozlatiti
Style:	Melodic black metal
Release date:	January 03, 2025
A review by:	RaduP

01. Direktiva 25
02. Krvava Bajka
03. Crna Ćuprija
04. Draksenić
05. Vođa
06. Sve Će To Narod Pozlatiti
07. Crveni Božuri
08. Sve Sam Sinove Pod Barjak Dala
09. Zaspite U Tihi San Kameni
10. Bitka Na Kozari
11. Kad Sam Bio Tri Moja Brata I Ja
12. Mrtvi Govore, Ćuti Samo Kamenje

Prognan's background in Hollywood soundtrack composing have been brought up the previous time they were covered here, but with Sve Će To Narod Pozlatiti, the runtimes have also reached Hollywoodian proportions.

There's a lot to notice about Prognan's current album run strictly from what's a surface level presentation. All three albums were released in January of three consecutive years, somehow that working out to guarantee that they didn't get swamped in the myriad of other releases that come later in the year, taking advantage of people who want to start listening to (and reviewing) music from the new year as soon as possible. But also the runtimes of each album subsequently increased. 2023's Naši Životi Više Ne Postoje's 65 minutes was, although on the longer side, fairly in line with usual black metal runtimes. Sjene Nad Balkanom's 80 minutes pushed the runtime to the limit that a CD could hold, but it still felt somewhat reasonable for an album. Sve Će To Narod Pozlatiti though is 133 minutes. That's more than two hours! That's even longer than the average film, if we are to continue with the Hollywoodian connection. Easy to conclude that this album is a pretty massive undertaking.

As mentioned, the band (more specifically its mastermind, Kob) worked in composing soundtracks, mostly in the form of trailer music, the very epic kind that sometimes gets labeled as "epic music". Kob owns InfraSound Trailer Music, and his resume includes some pretty huge Marvel movies, so the fact that the black metal avenue of his music being this underground and obscure even within the metal sphere is quite a strange contrast. Especially when the amount of care and research that went into creating the narrative and the soundscape. These albums having been planned ahead, with a fixed last album in mind, where the story (although one blocked behind a language barrier) does take a lot of precedence, does make the huge runtime of Sve Će To Narod Pozlatiti feel very purposeful. Even if the music itself carries that narrative sense, it's the story within it that feels like the central focus.

Kob went into a lot of detail about the creative process and the story of the previous albums in our interview, and the album's Bandcamp page contains info about where the story resumes this time around. To keep it short, fates of characters from previous albums, whose stories started in WW1, now reach a boiling point in WW2. Even with the historical contextualization, one that's thoroughly immersive and well constructed, the personal narrative and the emotional stakes are the ones that make the most impact within the music itself. The album's lyrics and voice acting (yes, voice acting) being in Croatian (or Serbo-Croatian if you really wanna go there) there is a pretty large language barrier that "my picking on a few words I know in Serbian" isn't enough to overcome, but it both makes it feel more authentic the same way a movie would be if they portrayed the characters speaking in their mother tongue instead of compromising to translating in English for accessible convenience, and the Bandcamp page has both the original and the English translated lyrics for each track, in case one wants to "watch this movie with subtitles", so to speak.

More so than any of the previous two Prognan records, Sve Će To Narod Pozlatiti feels almost interdisciplinary, using voice acted characters, sound effects, and orchestration played by an actual orchestra to force the listener to engage with it in a way other than what one usually would with an album, metal or otherwise. That's an approach that can sometimes feel a bit forced and unnatural when the focus is clearly on the cinematic side of the interdisciplinary approach, so the listening experience is definitely quite inconsistent. But there are also a lot of moments where the orchestral and cinematic quality works hand in hand with the melodicism from the melodic death/black metal, moments like my personal highlight "Zaspite U Tihi San Kameni (Pt. II)" that feel that emotionally resonant because the two aspects actually converge towards a more natural progression in the songwriting.

"The story and lyrics in this band is everything - it just happens that the band will need two more albums to tell it and call it quits." Well, time to gear up for the grand finale, eh?