For Crown of Thorns, the dynamic, ground-breaking follow-up to 2021’s Royal Destroyer, The Crown made distinctly different creative choices to ensure that the LP’s 10 songs would stand as a unique collection. “For me, Cobra Speed Venom and Royal Destroyer are like siblings,” says guitarist Marko Tervonen. And while Royal Destroyer was termed a “a ridiculously catchy album,” The Crown wanted to “make sure that we would take a step forward, get a bit more out of the comfort zone on Crown of Thorns.”
“We really wanted this to sound as a new fresh album and I believe we did it,” says Tervonen. The approach was full circle and inventive: “I had this idea that we should work a bit backwards, to try something new. I pushed to create the artwork very early in the process. We wanted the album cover to include a bridge from our hometown Trollhättan called “Strömkarlsbron.” It has this cool statue on it named “Strömkarlen” [a water spirit]. It made sense to loop it all back to the town where everything started; as most people know, we were called Crown of Thorns for a few years before we had to shorten the name.” Giannis Nakos’ final cover art proved inspirational, as The Crown focused on “‘’what kind of music does this artwork need?’ I wanted something really fast, melodic, heavy, epic, punky… areas we’ve touched before, but step it up to a new level. And to throw in a few surprises was also part of the process,” explains Tervonen.
Musical dynamics are also on a new level with the 2022 addition of drummer Mikael Norén and bassist Mattias Rasmussen, and the return of lead guitarist Marcus Sunesson, rejoining long time members Tervonen and vocalist Johan Lindstrand. “With Mikael we managed to bring back a bit more of that crazy ‘Janne Saarenpää’ feel to the drumming, so that was a really cool energy boost. Mattias comes more from a punk/crust background, and he wrote ‘I Hunt with the Devil’ and ‘Mind Collapse’ for the album, which turned out great. This is definitely a step up in many ways, changing the way we worked on the CSV and RD albums.”
The outcome of the revitalized process and personnel is evident in the first singles, “’Churchburner” and “Gone to Hell.” “’Churchburner’ starts out with a nod to “Postmortem” (Slayer) but then explodes into a quite different type of monster. It has a great groove and a tempo/beat that we don’t use that use that often, mostly in triplets,” Tervonen says. “’Gone to Hell” is a special song in numerous ways. “On our older albums there are many songs where the music is by “Olsfelt/Tervonen.” But that doesn’t actually mean that we wrote the song together,” Tervonen says. “This was the first time we wrote something together. [Founding bassist] Magnus [Olsfelt] showed me the basic riffs to the song on bass. We recorded it to a metronome and then I sort of took over. It’s the only song we did together before he left the band in 2022. “’Gone to Hell’ more mid-tempo with some almost post-punk elements. I love it and am super proud of it.” The guitarist laughingly welcomes fan feedback: “I expect to read a lot of ‘what is this soft song shit’ from people, otherwise I will be very disappointed!”
Crown of Thorns was mixed and mastered by Jonas Kjellgren (Black Lounge Studios), a longtime fan of the band. The end result is an album that’s extremely well produced yet possesses an energetic, raw approach. Another change is the guitar tuning: We decided to tune up to D from C,” Tervonen explains. “We played standard E tuning on our four first albums, then we slowly went over to D and from P13 and forward we tuned down to C. So now we have reversed the course and are climbing slowly back to E! But the lighter D tuning added so much better chugs and tones that we felt might be missing a bit on some of the latest records.”
Other stellar cuts include “Where Nightmares Belong,” which ends first with Johan screaming the chorus ‘Death Metal a capella’ before closing with a soft “lullaby style” female vocal courtesy of Elina. From there is epic album closer, “The Storm That Comes” which fits perfectly. Lyrically, Tervonen took the advice of another Swedish metal legend. “I remember years ago Tomas Lindberg (At the Gates) said that the words are already there, you just need to find them. I like that approach. A song like ‘Beyond the Frail’ or ‘We Drift On’ has a certain melancholic feel, so for those songs it felt natural to give the lyrics a more personal touch from within.”
It’s very few bands who have a revered and established career—The Crown celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2020 [their first eight years spent as Crown of Thorns]—yet up the ante continually. With 2018’s Cobra Speed Venom the band reached the same lofty heights as their 2002 landmark release, Crowned in Terror. And with the barbaric Royal Destroyer, and now, 2024’s powerful and unique Crown of Thorns, the metal vets rage with a rekindled fire and ferocity while honoring their roots.
As Tervonen concludes of Crown of Thorns, “I guess every band needs to do a self-titled album at some point. So now we did it, our way.”
This week Dave Griffiths sat down and spoke to the band about the album – you can take a listen to the interview right here:
