Svederna released their debut album on 50 handmade cassettes in 2013. Then, besides a split with USBM duo Ode Vinter the following year, the Swedish outfit lay dormant for the next five years. After finally releasing their sophomore full-length album, Svedjeland, in 2018 on Carnal Records, the Swedes return again with Härd, out August 28 on Carnal Records.
With a name like Härd, it better be. Even though it means hearth, Svederna’s new album nevertheless earns its false cognate. With more respect for than adherence to the past, Svederna’s latest full-length shows a band at war with creeping stagnancy. With the quartet’s tireless energy pushed through these tarry compositions, a pissed-off volatility quickly arises from such converging and contrasting dynamics. Härd is immediately threatening but sustains the intensity throughout its appreciable running time. While some black metal works brood. Härd attacks. The cataclysmic event has already occurred, but perhaps you can still outrun the raining magma. (You can’t.)
The band say, They are “proud to release Härd upon the world” in a statement prepared for today’s premiere. “This new creation fully incarnates what the band is all about – raw, groovy, old school intensity, coupled with classic Nordic melodic melancholy. Black metal with a gloves-off-approach, and a disregard for genre orthodoxy without losing touch with our roots. Like the two albums before it, it was recorded in the primeval forest of Värmland, Sweden, after a year of pouring blood, sweat, and riffs into our melting pot. ‘Härd’ is wholly mirrored in the twisted cover art by Björn Underek Lidberg and the equally sharp and rough production by Lars Robin Larsson Asp.”
Härd
CARNAL RECORDS
SVEDERNA
