Forged 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 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. 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.”
Comments the band on the track, “Life Knife Death,” “mankind casts a long shadow of bloodshed and brutality. From a whack on the head with a mammoth’s thigh bone to a drone strike against a children’s hospital. Life’s gonna life, human’s gonna knife.”
Stream WOLFBRIGADE’s previously released single, “Disarm Or Be Destroyed,” at http://metalblade.com/wolfbrigade
In a 2019 Bandcamp interview to promote their last LP, The Enemy: Reality, WOLFBRIGADE 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.”
Life Knife Death will be released on Sept 13 – Find preorders at: