Metal Anarchy

The Crown have revealed the details for their new album “Crown Of Thorns.” The effort will be released on October 11 and it can be pre-ordered HERE.

“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)

Guitarist Marko Tervonen commented:

“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.

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.

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.

With [drummer] Mikael [Norén], we managed to bring back a bit more of that crazy ‘Janne Saarenpää’ feel to the drumming, so that was a really cool energy boost. [Bassist] Mattias [Rasmussen] comes more from a punk/crust background, and he wrote ‘I Hunt With The Devil’ and ‘Mind Collapse,’ which turned out great. This is definitely a step up in many ways, changing the way we worked on the CSV and RD albums.

We [also] 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.”

A video for the record’s first single, “Churchburner,” can be found below. Tervonen added the following about that:

“‘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.”