Swedish death metal icons, THE CROWNwill release their full album «Crown Of Thorns» on October 11th through Metal Blade Records.

«Crown Of Thorns» is the band’s twelfth studio album as THE CROWN and is the dynamic and revolutionary continuation of “Royal Destroyer» from 2021. The band made distinctly different creative choices to ensure that the LP’s ten songs remained a single collection.

“For me, ‘Cobra Speed Venom‘ and ‘Royal Destroyer“They are like brothers,” says the guitarist Marko Tervonen. “We wanted to make sure we stepped up, got a little bit more out of our comfort zone in ‘Crown Of Thorns‘We wanted it to sound like a new, fresh record, and I think we’ve achieved that.’

The approach was comprehensive and inventive.

«I had the idea that we should work backwards a bit. I pushed to create the artwork very early in the process. We wanted the album cover to feature a bridge from our hometown Trollhättan called Strömkarlsbron. It has a really cool statue called ‘Strömkarlen‘ [espíritu del agua]It made sense to return to the city where it all began; as most people know, we are called ‘Crown Of Thorns‘ for a few years before we had to shorten the name.

The final cover of Giannis Nakos It was inspiring, since THE CROWN focused on the music that most complemented the work.

“I wanted something really fast, melodic, heavy, epic, punky,” he explains. Tervonen“areas that we’ve touched on before, but taking them to a new level. And throwing in some surprises was also part of the process.”

The musical dynamics are also on a new level with the addition of drummer in 2022 Mikael Norén and the bassist Mattias Rasmussenas well as the return of the lead guitarist Marcus Sunessonwho rejoins the usual members, Tervonen and the vocalist Johan Lindstrand.

“With Mikaelwe managed to recover a little more of that crazy air of ‘Janne Saarenpaää‘ on drums, so it was a great injection of energy. Mattias comes more from punk/crust, and wrote ‘I Hunt With The Devil‘ and ‘Mind Collapse‘, which turned out great. This is definitely a step forward in many ways, changing the way we worked on the CSV and RD albums.

Another change is the tuning of the guitar:

“We decided to tune to D from C,” he says. Tervonen. «We played standard E tuning on our first four albums, then slowly moved to D and ‘Possessed 13‘From then on we went down to C. So now we’ve reversed course and are slowly climbing back up to E! But the lighter D tuning added a lot of better punch and tone that we felt might have been a little lacking on some of the later records.’

The result of the revitalized process and personnel is evident in the first single, “Churchburner«.

«’Churchburner‘ begins with a nod to ‘Postmortem‘ [Slayer]but then explodes into a quite different kind of monster,” he notes. Tervonen. «It has a great groove, and it basically has a tempo/rhythm that we don’t use very often. Most of it is triplets. It’s a very powerful song in which Johan It’s on fire and Marcus adds a single matador as well.”

Watch the video of THE CROWN for “Churchburner” next.

«Crown Of Thorns» tracklisting:

«I Hunt With The Devil»
«Churchburner»
«Martyrian»
«Gone To Hell»
«Howling At The Warfield»
«The Night Is Now»
«God-King»
«The Agitator»
«Where Nightmares Belong»
«The Storm That Comes»
«Eternally Infernal» (Bonus Track)
«No Fuel For Godv (Bonus Track)
“Mind Collapse” (Bonus Track)

«Crown Of Thorns» was recorded by Marko Tervonen (Studio-MT), mixed and mastered by Jonas Kjellgren (Black Lounge Studios), and will be released in jewel case CD (US), limited digipak CD with three additional studio tracks (EU), and digital formats, as well as vinyl in the following color variants: