(Here’s DGR‘s review of the latest album by the Swedish death metal band Lik, out now on Metal Blade Records.)
We are now eleven years and four full-length albums into the death-obsessed career of Sweden’s Lik and it feels as if the group have been ever-present in one form or another. Formed right as the OSDM and Swede-death resurrections were full steam ahead, Lik have been steadily present just under the surface of the wider metal world.
There have been some decently long gaps between the group’s releases as well; a quick glance over their musical timeline suggests a pretty traditional three years or so gap between material but it always seems as if the band are always there in one’s listening habits. Perhaps it’s the fact that many of its members are spread out among larger bands like Bloodbath and Katatonia, so it seems almost inevitable that you’ll find yourself musing “Oh hey, it’s one of the guys from Lik!”
Or it could be that despite their clearly prescribed formula and tribute-paying at the altar of gore, Lik have proven themselves to be savants in the genre of death metal and happen to be particularly good at this.
Photo by Michaela Barkensjö
Lik have steadily improved from album to album as they’ve sharpened their blades or reinforced their shovels to dig deep into the ground and have achieved a much-vaunted act of becoming a solid default go-to. If the mood strikes you for ear-rending growls and guitars buzzing enough to set off a hornet’s nest, Lik have you covered. Carnage and Misanthropic Breed are near-automatic recommendations in that sense. No pretense or high-concept at work there, just infernally fast and simple enough to get your stomp on, Misanthropic Breed excelling well in this regard.
Yet there’s been almost a five-year gap between releases for Lik, with the groups newest album Necro having seen release in mid-April of 2025. As anyone can tell you, a lot of shit can happen in four and a half years but you would never guess it making the leap from Misanthropic Breed into Necro. Lik‘s newest album continues the path of steady improvement for the band and it feels like the most natural evolution they could’ve chosen.
They basically pick up right where they dropped off and have injected a taste for the circling d-beat riff at times to go alongside the mutilating guitar work and steady back beat that has been Lik‘s trademark for a while now. They have created something criminally infectious with Necro, even as the spotlight on the musical pools they are pulling from is bright enough to sear a shadow into the ground. Which is a long way of getting around to a simple statement: Lik‘s newest album is absolutely killer.
If time is money then Lik may as well be death metal’s Red Cross with just how charitable of an act they’re performing on Necro. Easily one of the more “no bullshit, no compromise” albums to hit so far in 2025, Necro gains high marks for keeping things at ten songs and forty minutes. Nothing on this album ever gets a chance to overstay its welcome and the two “long” songs – a weighty five minutes a piece – still have the same aura of a hostage extraction: get in, blow doors down, stun everything in the room, obtain and extract objective.
It seems that Lik‘s goal is to make sure your neck is sore by halfway into the album’s third song “They”. They have boiled down and collected the bones of some classic death metal riff work to construct Necro‘s opening two songs – even raising the spectre of groups like Discharge when things just aren’t punchy enough for the group. Given that so many bands have put a glorious guitar lead over a sped-up death metal stomp, it’s probably a shock to no one that it works really well for Lik too, resulting in two supremely strong highlights early on in Necro for both “Deceased” and “War Praise”. “War Praise” is the song that will likely win many people over, ensuring that Lik‘s goal of making sure your neck hurts by song three is well accomplished.
Even among all of this time-saving necessity and tightly packed three- and four-minute collective, sometimes you just need something that is an adrenaline shot to the arm, and we’d be remiss without touching upon the two-minute scorcher of “Shred Into Pieces”. Many albums this year have turned and metamorphosed into something else upon the mid-section of the album but Lik‘s Necro will have no such thing taking place under its roof. Instead, Lik follow one of the album’s longer songs – the suffocating “Morgue Rat” – with a death and thrash metal beatdown.
“Shred Into Pieces” is near-grind at the velocity it acheives, as Lik burn their way through its two minutes as if they’d been struck by stage pyrotechnics. Lik haven’t really exhausted the death metal playbook that they’ve mostly followed/partially written new chapters for by this point on Necro, yet “Shred Into Pieces” is something of a mid-album refresh, or at least a reminder that if you had found a sense of security in the swaying chug and thundering bass guitar, Lik can pull the rug out from under you in the blink of an eye. They do it again two songs later in “The Stockholm Massacre” because sometimes you can’t get the taste for high-speed out of the system once you let loose on the first song.
The one real fetid dirge that Lik save for themselves is Necro‘s final song, a pleasant number going by the name of “Rotten Inferno”. It wouldn’t be a proper death metal album without at least one song acting as if the listener is being dragged through the mud at points. “Rotten Inferno” finds its identity in steadily laying the album to rest upon a bed of ride bell and low intonations. While many of the songs on Necro deal with bodies, destruction, murder, and the destruction of bodies – as any good musical horror movie does – “Rotten Funeral” is the burial act for Necro as a whole. It’s almost chuckle-worthy then, that after all of the guitar-annihilation that takes place throughout Necro Lik chose to close out the album with a light bit of piano. One final bass roll and tortured guitar solo, only to mail the album out on a bit of quiet piano.
Lik‘s continual evolution into one of the meanest acts within the death metal realm has been an exciting one to watch as they haven’t put out a bad album yet. They’ve definitely become both guardian and priest of a very specific subsection of death metal, yet they’re so good at it that they are occasionally able to add a new page to the immense tome of the overall genre. Lik albums have sprungboard off of one another to reach for greater heights and Necro does the same, delivering unto Lik‘s canon some incredibly infectious songs that worm their way around your skull long after the album wraps up. Yes, there has been the aforementioned distance between albums for Lik but you’d never guess that going by the quality present on Necro. It just happens to be the latest iteration on a strong formula, adding far more than it might subtract, and resulting in a release that will be a fantastic go-to album for the rest of 2025.
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