HEAVEN SHALL BURN – HEIMAT

(Andy Synn has a lot of history with Heaven Shall Burn, which now includes their new album, Heimat, which is set for release this coming Friday on Century Media Records)

Way back in the year 2002 a young man who would one day come to be known (in certain dark corners of the internet, at least) as Andy Synn fell in love with an album by the name of Whatever It May Take by German Metalcore icon(oclast)s Heaven Shall Burn, who would go on to have a major influence on his music tastes for the foreseeable future.

That same year he also encountered an outstanding (some might even say seminal) piece of cinema named 28 Days Later, from director Danny Boyle, which would also have a huge impact on the media he would choose to consume going forwards and set the standard for what home-grown Horror could be.

And now, here we are in 2025 with new releases from both band and director demanding our attention once more… but while one of those has proven to be a crushing disappointment, let’s hope that the other one lives up to its legacy, shall we?

So, first, the bad news – although Heimat is ultimately a solid addition to the band’s back-catalogue, it’s unlikely to go down in history as one of their best.

That doesn’t make it bad by any means – over the course of their twenty-seven year career I can count on the fingers of one hand, possibly even with just one finger, how many of their records have actually disappointed me to that level – it’s just that album number ten never really reaches the heights of say, the aforementioned Whatever It May Take or phenomenal fan-favourite Iconoclast, nor does it display the same boldness as its recklessly ambitious double-disc predecessor (there’s nothing here as powerfully infectious as “Protector” or as unexpectedly experimental as “Expatriate”, for example).

That being said, there’s a certain pleasure to be had from taking a trip down memory lane with the band and reliving some of the best bits of the post-millennium Metalcore years (you know, back when the genre still had some deathy, thrashy teeth and the biggest bands weren’t so obsessed with record contracts and radio play) through older, wiser eyes, as while the likes of chug-happy bruiser “My Revocation of Compliance” and “Confounder” may not be offering anything new to the scene (the latter, in fact, sometimes reminds me more of early 2000s Darkest Hour than anything else) they’re still a hell of a lot of fun to play (and replay) all the same.

Sure, some of the mis-steps are impossible to ignore – “Empowerment” is a weirdly dull dud, while the overall structure and pacing issues caused by the inclusion of an intro, interlude, and an outro track make it feel more like a rough combination of two EPs rather than a consistent, or coherent, album – and the less said about the utterly banal, by-the-numbers cover of Killswitch Engage‘s classic “Numbered Days” (which features an appearance from KsE‘s Jesse Leach that only makes you wonder “why am I not just listening to the original?” even more) the better, but the stand-out tracks, even if they fall a little short of the top tier of the band’s output, are still more than worth spending your money on.

In addition to “My Revocation of Compliance”, which I’ve already mentioned, the relentless heaviness and ferocious forward momentum of “Those Left Behind” and the hooky-yet-harsh attack of “Ten Days In May” are both delivered with a sense of vigour and vitality that few other bands who’ve been fighting the good fight for as long as Heaven Shall Burn have (and even some who haven’t been going that long) can still match, while the more measured and melodic, but no less intense, strains of “A Silent Guard” demonstrates that – in the right hands (and these are definitely still the right hands) – the slow-burn approach can be just as effective as bombastic, balls to the wall, belligerence.

Look, they say that you can’t go home again… but, here Heaven Shall Burn have proven that that’s not necessarily true – sometimes it’s nice to go back to your roots, not just to reconnect with them but to appreciate how far you’ve come.