(As of late our writer DGR has been leaning into melodic death metal, and that tilted him into the new album by Finland’s Thy Kingdom Will Burn, released in January by Scarlet Records.)
Any long-standing musical genre will develop its own regional flavorings over time. Many of them are echoes of the first handful of groups to break through in that particular style, later to become ingrained in the blood of any following acts. The tower of influences effectively comes crashing down to be compacted into a simple statement ‘this is recognizable as having come from…’ and so on.
This is how people end up specializing in styles from certain countries, and with a practiced ear and enough familiarity, you can conjure the basic tenets of a certain region simply by seeing it referenced in front of a genre listing. Some are way more prominent than others and those that fly under the metal detection sphere instead feel like an undercurrent and noticeable pattern.
Finland has been a fun country in this respect because the one genre they truly seem to dominate is the folk-metal and folk-song-inspired genre-sphere. There’s a plethora of groups all specializing in music that sways with the rhythm of drinking songs and veers hard on the edge of feeling like an extreme take on power-metal’s sugar-laden hooks. Were Finland to wear crowns, that would be one of a scant handful teetering precariously upon its head.
No shock then, that many of those melodic sensibilities – and even particular recognizable motifs – seem to have bled through into the country’s other musical aspirations, including what seems to be a recent revitilization of its melodeath sphere.
Photo Credit: Teppo Ristola Photography
The Loss And Redemption is Thy Kingdom Will Burn‘s third album. Formed in 2016 and hailing from Kuovola, Finland, the band had a period of immense activity starting out. Once they got through the primordial demo and EP phases of a band’s life cycle, Thy Kingdom Will Burn would then release its first full-length and follow immediately with a second just one year later. The Loss And Redemption follows three years after that burst of activity, somewhat normalizing the band’s output and life cycle.
In Thy Kingdom Will Burn‘s newest release one will find all of the hallmarks mentioned before of their region’s melodeath scene, cleaned and crystalized into a perfectly teachable example. The four-piece favor the mid-tempo melodeath swagger with the occasional dalliance into the higher headbanging numbers, but it seems as if they weren’t able to let go of tradition, and most of the songs on The Loss And Redemption sway with the rolling of the waves.
The album musically sails between equal parts glorious battle anthem and slower charges, with their overall sound augmented by light keyboard and synth work. This is a release that at times can even have a ‘bounce’ to it, but much of that comes from the music turning more turbulent underneath; it’s not so much a bounce as it is the listener’s boat hitting the top of one wave only to catch airtime as it drops out from beneath it.
It’s hard to pin down how exactly these sounds became so ingrained in the region’s sound but Thy Kingdom Will Burn are as if a claw were reaching through time and grabbing you, pulling you backwards into the early-to-mid-aughts-years of the overall melodic death metal scene. Their sensibilities recall a time in which many of these groups were experimenting with keyboard work in their sound, and many of them seeking a way to amplify their slower songs by beginning to gleefully pull from the folk-metal sphere. Finland was one of those places on Earth that heard this, took the ball, and fucking ran with it.
This isn’t to say that Thy Kingdom Will Burn are a walking time capsule of a group but they certainly understand what they were aiming to do, and they’ve recognized the building blocks in play and what is integral to their musical DNA.
On their Bandcamp page, Thy Kingdom Will Burn describe themselves as aiming wider than just a melodic death metal band, riveting the term melodic dark metal into their biography as well. While perhaps misunderstood on this end as being a sort of umbrella haven for the Sentenced-era goth kid crowd to downtune and play faster and with a little more chug in the sound than perhaps the northern depression mindset allows for, the term does leave Thy Kingdom Will Burn some room to experiment across The Loss And Redemption.
We’ve zeroed hard on how the band play it pretty close to the chest with their music anyway, but there is surprise to be found within this album’s boundaries as Thy Kingdom Will Burn work to justify so many of the songs here sitting near or over the five-minute mark when you’d normally expect a surgical strike that is over and out around three-plus. Five means we’re going to be getting fairly indulgent with just how much a powerful galloping riff can actually carry a song.
Opening with their longest song is a brave maneuver for Thy Kingdom Will Burn but “Perpetual Void” is a solid first impression of how this release is going to flow as a whole. The band’s take on the melodeath style has an epic grandeur to it. and opening moments like the lead segment of “Perpetual Void” would slot perfectly well into Insomnium‘s playbook as well. Thy Kingdom Will Burn are on a journey through “Perpetual Void” and along the way are gathering many of the elements they use to construct the rest of their album.
There’s light orchestral synth work happening in the background across most of the song – particularly during the chorus – and that is another piece of the Thy Kingdom Will Burn puzzle that permeates its way through the entirety of The Loss And Redemption as a whole. They treat it as another weapon in the arsenal and not something that they are beholden to, so you’ll do large parts of the album without hearing anything of the sort, such that you almost forget that they did do the ‘epic wandering through the mountains’ song until it pops its head up again later on.
Since Thy Kingdom Will Burn are an amalgamation of varied melodeath influences you do get the occasional surprise along the way. They serve up some fairly good red meat in the more traditional ass-kickers – and yes, lightly folk metal inspired riff-work – on “Obscure Existence” and “Martyrs Of Killing Floor”, but as you venture deeper into this album as a whole you’ll get blindsided by a song like “Suffering Sky”, whose opening intonations are at least two or three leagues deeper in the dark than most of The Loss And Redemption. The opening guitar parts in particular are like a massive crashing of the waves in comparison to the quicker groove that has peppered the album. While the song eventually evolves into something more traditional and in line with the rest of the release – it has over five and a half minutes to do so mind you – “Suffering Sky” is in the caliber of ‘heavier’ songs in the bounds of this album.
You even get the return of the aforementioned keyboard stings becoming more prominent within this region of the album, which then stick around to become part of the more death metal oriented “Dreams Of Calamity” – a song whose guiding philosophy seems to have been ‘all elements, up front, everything at once’. While Thy Kingdom Will Burn have been fairly staid and straightforward through their album up to this point, maybe they figured they were going to shock people awake with the first half of that song before segueing into a catchy lead guitar part and quieter sung segment.
Where The Loss And Redemption deserves a lot of credit is that no element is ever wasted on the album. Thy Kingdom Will Burn put a lot on their plate and still leave it clean when they wrap the album up. They’re not breaking through any artistic boundaries here, so even though we’ve had a bit of fun early on with genre-tagging and how they describe themselves, the reality is that they’re staying pretty close to the melodeath blueprint. It’s a big and fairly populated house by this point so it can be difficult for any group to truly stand out, but you don’t often get a release of the strain that The Loss And Redemption hails from too often either.
When the particular overarching genre itself has been linking up with different combinations and styles for various genre-trysts for so long that you have groups now forming as throwback, tribute acts, and time capsules, a group like Thy Kingdom Will Burn who clearly have one foot already in the traditional and folksier style of things is quite the offer. The Loss And Redemption will, for a lot of people, be like a very bright torch, ever briefly lit and in that moment absolutely blinding but quickly becoming part of the overall visual landscape. But there are many listeners out there for whom Thy Kingdom Will Burn‘s particular grab-bag of influence and genre absorption will appeal tremendously. They have a melodic ear that cannot be denied and the collective of times wherein the band truly let loose – moreso in the back half than the front of this album – they fully justify the time spent listening.
https://thykingdomwillburn.bandcamp.com/album/the-loss-and-redemption
https://www.facebook.com/thykingdomwillburn/