Swedish death metal outfit The Crown have settled upon “Crown Of Thorns” as the title to their twelfth studio album. Metal Blade Records will have that effort out on October 11th. Recording sessions for it took place at Studio-MT in the group’s hometown of Trollhättan, Sweden with rhythm guitarist Marko Tervonen overseeing the production duties.
Speaking of the record and what the band achieved with it, Tervonen offered:
“For me, ‘Cobra Speed Venom‘ and ‘Royal Destroyer‘ are like siblings. [We wanted] to make sure that we would take a step forward, get a bit more out of our comfort zone on ‘Crown Of Thorns‘. We really wanted this to sound like a new, fresh album and I believe we did it.”
He added:
“I had the idea that we should work a bit backwards. I pushed to create the artwork very early in the process. We wanted the album cover to include a bridge from our hometown Trollhättan called Strömkarlsbron. It has this cool statue on it named ‘Strömkarlen’ [a water spirit]. It made sense to loop it all back to the town where everything started; as most people know, we were called ‘Crown Of Thorns‘ for a few years before we had to shorten the name.”
He continued:
“I wanted something really fast, melodic, heavy, epic, punky. Areas we’ve touched before, but step it up to a new level. And to throw in a few surprises was also part of the process.”
Speaking on the direction taken with this record, he shared:
“We decided to tune up to D from C. We played standard E tuning on our four first albums, then we slowly went over to D and from ‘Possessed 13‘ and forward we tuned down to C. So now we have reversed the course and are climbing slowly back to E! But the lighter D tuning added so much better chugs and tones that we felt might be missing a bit on some of the latest records.”
“Churchburner” is the lead single from the effort and a video for it was directed by Christoffer Tönnäng. That clip is available for viewing below. Tervonen weighed in on that track, offering:
“‘Churchburner‘ starts out with a nod to ‘Postmortem‘ [Slayer] but then explodes into quite a different type of monster. It has a great groove to it, and it basically has a tempo/beat that we don’t use that often. It’s mostly in triplets. It’s a very strong song with Johan being on fire here and Marcus adds a killer solo as well.”
“Crown Of Thorns” track listing:
01 – “I Hunt With The Devil”
02 – “Churchburner”
03 – “Martyrian”
04 – “Gone To Hell”
05 – “Howling At The Warfield”
06 – “The Night Is Now”
07 – “God-King”
08 – “The Agitator”
09 – “Where Nightmares Belong”
10 – “The Storm That Comes”
11 – “Eternally Infernal” (bonus track)
12 – “No Fuel for God” (bonus track)
13 – “Mind Collapse” (bonus track)
You can find pre-orders for the album via metalblade.com/thecrown.
