(Late last week Hammerheart Records released the debut album from the Swedish death metal band Impurity, and today we follow that with Zoltar‘s interview of all four bandmembers.)

We’ve seemingly been buried under an endless stream of classic Swedish death metal sounding bands lately, old and new, as if one could never get enough of THAT instantly recognizable buzzsaw guitar sound and part-old-school-death-metal-part-crust dynamic, more than thirty years after Left Hand Path originally dropped, turning the scene upside down. Not that it is a bad thing, mind you but the downside of this endless outpour is that fans tend to stick a rather tunnel-visioned view of what Swedish death metal was/is.

Granted, Entombed, Grave, and Dismember all wrote the rules most of their followers to this day strictly follow. But once you started going beyond the mandatory Into The Grave or Clandestine, less-talked-about or cursed by the ‘wrong label’ plague acts like Necrophobic or Hetsheads had their own say about what Swedish death metal could also be about, with a meaner, darker, and even satanic at times edge to it.

All four members of Impurity weren’t even born when said bands were first active but that didn’t prevent them from fully embracing their elders’ (morbid) vision, yet without trying to play the retro card. As a matter of fact, while being recorded at Studio Sunlight – yep, THE Studio Sunlight where ALL Entombed, Grave, and Dismember early misbehaviors were put to tape and where THAT guitar sound was basically invented – their just-released debut album The Eternal Sleep goes the extra mile by truly tapping into something more sinister and menacing. And as you can read below, they know their shit alright! Continue reading »