Swedish hardcore punk icons and recent Metal Blade signees, Wolfbrigade, will release their eleventh full-length studio offering, Life Knife Death, on September 13 via Metal Blade Records.
Formed in 1995 in the small Swedish city of Mariestad by key players from Sweden's legendary hardcore scene, Wolfbrigade - previously known as Wolfpack until 1999 - stands among Scandinavia's most respected, influential, and reliable purveyors of real-world brute-force tumult.
On their crushing Life Knife Death, thirty years of skill are honed to a fine edge and dispatched with greater style and intensity than ever before. Most immediately, there's the sheer velocity and barely controlled rage pumping through dynamic d-beaten blood-shakers like "Ways To Die" and "Your God Is A Corpse," the furious attack assisted to heart-fluttering greatness by a newly loosened sense of raucous spontaneity. "We didn't really rehearse any of the songs on this album," the band reveals. "We tend to overwork and overanalyze everything that we do, and sometimes we get lost in that process. This time we wanted to go rough, to capture the raw essence of the song when it's just out of the womb. All the blood and gore."
Wolfbrigade's penchant for focused self-reflection aided them most satisfyingly in the arrangement and sequencing of these twelve killer tunes. The subtle shades of melody and versatility throughout Life Knife Death represents another of Wolfbrigade's strongest suits, the songs progressing with an organic, complementary flow, from the epic guitar heroics opening "Unruled And Unnamed" to the spooky churning outro "The Age Of Skull Fuckery."
The band's disparate influences are drawn together with unifying solidity - the remorseless rhythms of Discharge, the blue-collar rock 'n' roll of Motörhead, the heads-down bludgeon of classic Entombed - even the Beatles get a look in, albeit in subverted form, with the splendid title "A Day In The Life Of An Arse." "I just thought of that song title, which is genius on its own, and 'Of An Arse' just popped into my head. Beatles churned through the Wolfbrigade mill, the horror of waking up to another day, playing your part in the never ending shitscene of mankind."
In a 2019 Bandcamp interview to promote Wolfbrigade's last LP, The Enemy: Reality, bassist Johan Erkenvåg observed that, "the political climate in the world these past few years has been the worst that we've ever experienced in our lifetimes." After half a decade of war, pestilence, catastrophe, and terror, it's as if the world heard Erkenvåg's assertion and said, "hold my beer." Mounting global chaos may have us all darkly fearing the end times, but it has also seemingly created the ideal circumstances for a hardcore punk LP as coruscatingly brutal as Wolfbrigade's Life Knife Death.
"Well yeah, who could've known! The five years that have passed since our last album have served as a pretty good backdrop for a new punk record or misanthropy in general," affirms the band, adding a wry reference for the Bill Hicks fans, "Mankind - a virus with shoes. As always, our lyrics are fueled by the ever-growing disgust we feel about humanity. The everyday realization that we are a part of this fear-animalistic stupidity that drives the world further into oblivion. The inspiration just keeps raining down from the sky, killing the masses. Waking up to this every day makes us want to scream in horror."
In advance of the release of Life Knife Death, today the band unleashes first single, "Disarm Or Be Destroyed" noting of the track, "This is a song about the ugliness of desire and the beauty of destruction. The urge to burn and destroy is also an urge to create and evolve. Right or wrong, there's pleasure in smashing some things into pieces." Listen to the track below.
Life Knife Death will be released on CD and digital formats as well as vinyl in the following formats:
- White (US)
- 180g Black (EU)
- Orange Marbled (EU - Ltd. 1000)
- 180g Black (EU - Ltd. 500)
- Dark Grey Marbled (EU - Ltd. 500)
- Clear w/ Red/White splatter (EU - Sound Pollution Exclusive Ltd. 200)
- Orange w/ Red Splatter (EU - Evil Greed Exclusive Ltd. 300)
- Orange/Black Dust Splatter (EU - 200)
- Orange/Black Split (EU - TNOR Exclusive - 200)
Find pre-orders here.
Life Knife Death tracklisting:
"Ways to Die"
"Disarm or Be Destroyed"
"Life Knife Death"
"A Day in the Life of an Arse"
"Unruled and Unnamed"
"Skinchanger"
"Your God Is a Corpse"
"Nail Bomb"
"Cyanide Messiah"
"Mayhem Mongrel"
"Sea of Rust"
"Age of Skull Fuckery"
"Disarm Or Be Destroyed":
Wolfbrigade is:
Micke Dahl - vocals
Erik Norberg - guitar
Jocke Rydbjer - guitar
Johan Erkenvåg - bass
Tommy Storback - drums
(Photo - Therese Öhrvall)
