AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HKSPK — “HEIMKEHR”

Sep 102026

(written by Islander)

Because some people seem to value our daily premieres, they offer many opportunities for this listener/writer to both re-connect with bands we’ve learned to admire and to connect for the first time with others whose music is a new discovery.

Today we make one of those first connections by premiering a new album named Heimkehr by the German band HKSPK. This isn’t HKSPK’s first release — it was preceded by their 2024 Holy Scum debut album and their 2025 EP The Human Butcher — but it’s the first exposure we’ve had to their music.

That exposure has made an eye-opening impression, and we are glad for the chance to now share the whole album with you in advance of its release tomorrow (September 11th).

Heimkehr is a compact album, delivering eight tracks in a total of about 25 1/2 minutes, but it proves to be quite a diverse listening experience. HKSPK’s musical foundations are rooted in black and death metal, but the album experience demonstrates broader stylistic interests and a very impressive talent for writing songs that coherently and cogently bring them into play.

They have a knack for crafting memorable melodies and creating mood-moving atmospheres, and a talent for getting listeners’ hearts racing (and occasionally for beating them senseless).

We usually try to resist the temptation for writing song-by-song reviews, but resisting is more difficult when album tracks are as varied as they are on Heimkehr. So, we’ll throw caution to the winds — though feel free to skip down to the album stream if your patience wanes.

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Heimkehr opens with “Prelude“, a haunting introduction that’s perhaps best experienced beneath grey skies and drizzling rain. It unfolds with a somber piano melody that’s eventually joined by flute-like tones, whistling strings, and drums that boom like thunder. It includes spoken words near the end, which function as a segue to the album’s second track, “Torture“.

With that song HKSPK explode the melancholy moods of the album overture, discharging a melodic black metal riff that dismally buzzes amidst catastrophic drum eruptions that soon transform into hurtling blast-beats.

The harmonized riffing accelerates and begins to sound both anguished and berserk, and the screamed vocals sound even more berserk when they arrive. The whirring guitars swell and soar above molten bass lines and constantly changing drum progressions, building feelings of tension and pain as they do, but offering no reprieve.

The riffing, in its differing dimensions within “Torture“, can be understood as a dialogue between two voices, and as HKSPK have explained, the music manifests “how fear, exaggeration and misread signals can distort” the understanding and perception of “the same harmless moment”.

The follow-on song “White Secretions II” (so named because it connects to “White Secretions I” on the band’s debut album Holy Scum) keeps the energy and intensity dialed high, discharging dual-guitar riffage that vibrantly throbs, viciously sizzles, and mercurially swirls, backed by another thundering rhythm-section performance.

This time, guttural roars trade off with cauterizing screams, adding to the song’s feeling of feral mayhem. The song also devolves into a thuggishly brutalizing breakdown, though its still threaded with buzzing guitar lines, which begin to sound downright miserable.

Those first three songs by themselves provide a swift introduction to the breadth of HKSPK’s musical interests, but the fourth song “Sonnenjäger” expands the breadth even more. Leaning into death metal, it sets the stage with a jolting and jabbing overture and then cuts loose in an assault of viciously writhing tremolo’d riffing, neck-chopping beats, and rabidly malevolent vocals. The song also includes brutish battering-ram blows, adamant spoken words, and a closing dose of full-throttle blasting.

Four songs in… and four songs to go… and those final four maintain the album’s already-evident stylistic diversity and dynamism. “Kill the Weak” intertwines punk, hardcore, black metal, and explosive vocal belligerence to create a black-hearted but head-hooking and muscle-moving musical tirade, while “Rot In Despair” down-shifts the pacing and creates an unsettling array of dismal and distressing moods as it gradually builds toward powerful crescendos of traumatic intensity and sweeping scale — which are segmented with a brightly darting guitar melody of a kind you won’t often hear in extreme metal.

For the final two songs, HKSPK lead listeners on further twists and turns in the musical path. “Rain In The Face” (a song named for a historical Lakota warrior) includes big bounding beats and swaths of downhearted black-metal riffing, as well as guitar motifs that urgently throb, vividly swirl, and seem to grievously wail. And near the end plaintive singing relieves the band’s usual scorching vocal hostility, just before a closing guitar instrumental that adds to the song’s feelings of loss.

And that leaves the title song, which is also the album’s longest track. HKSPK have commented about the song in a statement we’ve excerpted:

“Heimkehr” is the closing track of the album and brings together its central themes: memory, comradeship, loss, emptiness and the lasting consequences of past battles. This is not a triumphant return, but the moment that follows – when the noise has faded, the wounds remain and it becomes clear that nothing is the same as before…. The track deliberately leaves the album on a heavy and unresolved note. The destination is reached, but not without damage. You return home – but not whole.

Musically, “Heimkehr” opens with folkloric picking and harsh spoken words, as well as accents of flute and accordion plus enormous percussive rumbles. It creates a grieving experience, which doesn’t leave us even after the band carry the melody forward with speedily whirring guitars on the back of racing drums.

The song also includes caustic blackened snarls and riffing that’s more grim and cold, as well as stalking beats and ragged-edged guitars that yield no hope. A mid-song interlude seems to stylistically circle back to the song’s moody opening, and it’s enthralling — a few moments of contemplation before HKSPK send a rapidly trilling guitar melody soaring high over the top of earth-quaking drums-and-bass and scalding screams. Yet the final moments, soft and brittle, seem to leave the damage in the music unhealed.

And now, please enjoy the full album stream: