(written by Islander)
The Swedish heavy metal luminaries who formed Heir Corpse One in 2020 obviously had their tongues in their cheeks when they picked the name, twisting the call-sign of the U.S. president’s official plane to suit the twisted tale they wished to tell.
That tale, which began to unfold in the band’s 2021 debut album Fly the Fiendish Skies, envisioned a group of wealthy passengers fleeing the pandemic in a private jet (like that ever happened!), only to crash, descend into cannibalism, and trigger a zombie outbreak.
The narrative was so tailor-made for the manifold awfulness of the covid pandemic that it wouldn’t have been surprising if Heir Corpse One had been a “one and done” project. But no, these people obviously had so much fun making that first album that they forged on, not just with the music but with the gruesome concept story.
And so now we’re on the verge of getting the second Heir Corpse One album, Destination: Domination. And by “verge”, we mean the brink of February 6th, which is when Emanzipation Productions will disgorge the record. As you’re about to discover first-hand, it’s a ghastly delight.
We mentioned “Swedish metal luminaries” above, and that’s no exaggeration when speaking of the Heir Corpse One founders, Rogga Johansson (Paganizer, Massacre, and many more) and Peter Svensson (Cales, Assassin’s Blade, Void Moon, and many more).
For the newest album, they’ve rounded out the lineup with lead guitarist Kjetil Lynghaug (Mordenial, Vredesblod, Paganizer) and drummer Marcus Rosenkvist (Assassin’s Blade, To Descend, Anchorite), presumably offering them a lavish buffet of human brains as extra inducement.
As for how the pandemic-inspired story continues on the new full-length, here’s a synopsis from the label:
Picking up the narrative thread from the debut of the band… the [new] record follows the undead survivors of the doomed luxury-jet crash as they embark on a grotesque mission toward the heart of power. Their macabre flight sets loose a plague of undeath across the land, transforming farms and towns into slaughtergrounds. As brutal survival machines rise to resist the onslaught, the dead continue their relentless advance. With humanity collapsing under the weight of the black infection, a blasphemous Undead Nation emerges – an age where death claims absolute rule.
“Swedish death metal rooted firmly in the iconic ‘Sunlight Studio sound’” is the broad descriptor of the music that’s offered up on the 10 new songs. The first taste (so to speak) was a single called “The Last Supper”, which is the album’s penultimate song – right before the fantastic “Undead Nation”. You can imagine from the music alone that this has nothing to do with the New Testament’s famous Passover meal.
Its opening guitar melody generates a dismal and sorrowful mood, even as it stomps and slugs. But with a spooky guitar solo leading the way, the band take off, discharging buzzing swaths of gutting riffage, galloping beats, and Johansson’s distinctively monstrous growls.
The music continues to dismally wail as well as feverishly jitter, and to morbidly throb and moan as well as squeal and hammer. Speaking of hammering, the rhythm section lock into a pulverizing groove as the backdrop for a soaring and vibrantly swirling guitar solo that’s both eerie and thoroughly electrifying.
“The Last Supper” was a good choice for a first single, a vivid example of the songwriting dynamism displayed across the album as a whole – and a fine example of just how catchy these tunes are as well.
But Destination: Domination tells a story, and so we should begin at the beginning, shouldn’t we? And where the album begins is with the ghoulish title song, in which the riffing maniacally buzzes and viciously swarms, backed by booming grooves and galloping beats. Way up high, the lead guitar ecstatically screams, and way down below the vocals malignantly roar (grit-coated but intelligible).
Even in the first song, Heir Corpse One shift the mood, causing the whirring riffage to drop and drag, manifesting agony, and even the lead guitar finds a moment to express misery instead of mad jubilation.
And from there the album continues to get the muscles of listeners twitching and their adrenaline flowing. As we say in the trade, the band aren’t trying to reinvent any wheels or experimentally push their chosen genre ingredients in any surprising directions. It’s more obvious that they’re just doing something they love to do, and they happen to be very damned good at it.
The ensuing songs continue to channel sensations of grisliness and horror, predominantly through those perniciously buzzing (and relentlessly infectious) tremolo’d riffs and the cavernous monstrosity and gagging ghoulishness of the vocals, and they capture madness principally through those feverish, piercing solos — whose shrill, spiraling, and dive-bombing spectacles never stop seizing attention – but also with some hair-raising screams mixed in.
The rhythm section do a professional job — the drums shift gears from hammering gallops and primitive lurches to jumping skips and punk scampers, and the bass provides a warm thrust and throb. Together they help fuel these mostly up-tempo songs with head-moving energy, and they’re a solid factor in why the tracks are so groovesome – though the shifts in riffing are a big factor too, as they rhythmically jolt, slash, and blare.
As mentioned earlier, the songs also include passages that seem to melodically express hopelessness and misery, and on occasion (the opening of “Shelter In the Darkness”, the mid-point of the hulking “Well of Blood”, and the closing phase of “Undead Nation” being prime examples) the soloing wails like a tremulous spirit lost in the void, a reminder that this album-length tale is a supernatural one.
And by the way, that song, “Shelter In the Darkness”, captures everything about the album that we’ve been trying to express above, and is the one we’d recommend first to people who want to “taste test” the album before diving all the way in.
But you really should dive all the way in, because everything here is a hell of a lot of highly addictive fun. So take the plunge!
Destination: Domination will be released on February 6th by Emanzipation Productions in CD and digital formats, with worldwide distribution by Target Group and Plastic Head.
PRE-ORDER:
https://targetshop.dk/heir-corpse-one/
https://heircorpseone.bandcamp.com/album/destination-domination
HEIR CORPSE ONE:
https://www.facebook.com/HeirCorpseOne/