Life Knife Death, from the veteran Swedish hardcore punk band Wolfbrigade, is the follow-up album to 2019’s The Enemy: Reality.
Formed in 1995 in the small Swedish city of Mariestad by key players from Sweden’s legendary hardcore scene, Wolfbrigade (known as Wolfpack until 1999) remain among Scandinavia’s most respected, influential and reliable purveyors of real-world brute-force hullabaloo. On this eleventh album, the niftiest skills honed to a fine edge over 30 years are dispatched with greater style and intensity than ever. 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. “We didn’t really rehearse any of the songs on this album,”the band reveals. “We tend to overwork and overanalyze everything that we do, and sometimes we get lost in that process. This time we wanted to go rough, to capture the raw essence of the song when it’s just out of the womb. All the blood and gore.”
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”.
