Over the course of a quarter-century career the Swedish musician and vocalist Jonny Pettersson has been involved in an enormous number of bands and personal projects — 30 of them by the count at Metal-Archives, including Wombbath, Heads for the Dead, Just Before Dawn, Berzerker Legion, and Ashcloud. But of all of them, Henry Kane seems to have become the vehicle most adaptable to Pettersson‘s changing inspirations and interests.
That opinion is based on observing the evolutions that have occurred across Henry Kane‘s three albums so far, and the fact that it’s a solo project in which Pettersson writes everything and performs everything. Indeed, he started the project to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his first demo, naming it for the soul-devouring supernatural antagonist in the Poltergeist film series.
In contemplating a genre label for Henry Kane‘s debut album Den förstörda människans rike, you might consider crusty death/grind, or deathly grind/crust, or grinding death/crust, infused with horror and tuned to maximum slaughtering insanity. If anything, the second album Age of the Idiot was an even more ruinous sonic wrecking machine but also more variable, with a greater number of musical twists and turns.
The new Henry Kane album Circle of Pain (coming out on May 17th via Selfmadegod Records) twists even more from the project’s deathly crust and grind roots. As Jonny Pettersson has told us in advance of today’s album premiere:
“The best thing about Henry Kane for me, is that there are no boundaries to adhere to. So, with this album, I wanted to take what I have done on the previous albums and push the sound even further, and then wrap it all up in blastbeats, anger, and hate.”
One of the early singles from the new album, a song called “Numb“, provided tangible evidence of the morphing away from grind and crust that has occurred on Circle of Pain.
The song is a very dark one, but often frighteningly majestic in its towering scale, and equally obliterating. The vocals (as ever) are raw and unhinged but also imperiously monstrous, and the glittering brightness of the rapidly whirling leads seizes attention just as much as the catastrophic upheavals and strafing detonations in the low end. The song also inflicts brutish chugging grooves and explodes in percussive blasting — a few more ingredients as if more were needed to take your breath away.
The other early single from the album, “A swarm of idiots“, is the track that opens the record, and it reinforces the impressions created by “Numb“. Sweeping keys immediately elevate the music, sounding like a heavenly choir, though the rumbling and battering in the low end create a contrasting frenzy, and so do the feverish guitars and Pettersson‘s blast-furnace vocals (interspersed with gang chants).
Once again, the music crafts a hybrid of magnificence and chaos, and of peril and fear — but it also includes a soft and grim bass-led interlude, reinforcing the feelings of inner pain that also shadow the song.
It’s not as if the crust and grind ingredients of Henry Kane‘s death metal have completely vanished, but in those first two singles they’ve been given supporting roles rather than standing out front. The other songs on the album reinforce that impression.
Unquestionably, red rage is a throughline on the album as a whole, but the music is also indeed a circle of pain — and the rage and the pain are portrayed on an enormous scale, as if Henry Kane were striving to capture afflictions of humanity writ large. The prominence of keys, the enormity of the low-end turbulence, and the massively mauling timbre of the riffs all contribute to that effect, but so do the shredding and roaring extravagance of the vocals, which are often doubled for added impact.
Here and there Henry Kane adds bits of eerie electronica, dancing keyboard notes, and other gravel-chewing bass interludes so listeners can catch a few quick breaths, coming briefly down to earth in the midst of episodes where we’re envisioning the heavens on fire and celestial kingdoms shattering into rubble and falling through the skies.
Which is another way of saying the album is as broadly and darkly atmospheric as it is ferociously obliterating. Perhaps the darkest and most soul-shattering song is “Wealth of obscurity“, which is as much an anthem of suffering, completely with piercing leads that seem to wail in despair and immense heaving chords of agony, as it is a catastrophic war zone of sound.
The immediately following song “Weird fiction founded“, is also damned dark and grief-stricken (as well as towering and tumultuous), but it includes the surprise of interludes fashioned with smoothly murmuring and acoustic notes, ethereal synths, and head-hooking drum-beats. And as another surprise, that song in its crescendos also seems uplifting and hopeful.
No, the D-beats, the crust/punk, and the death/grind influences haven’t been locked away in a closet on Circle of Pain — their presence is part of what makes the album so viscerally gripping — but now they’re parts of a multi-faceted and electrifying amalgam, and there’s no better example of that than the album’s closing song, “En önskan i mörkret“, which scampers, beats with punk chords, breaks hearts, and reveals daunting and wondrous panoramas.
As we’ve been trying to explain, this isn’t an album that lends itself to simple genre categorization. There would be a lot of hyphens in any such descriptors now. Whatever you want to call, it, however, it’s relentlessly gripping, moving, and memorable… as you’ll now discover for yourselves:
Circle Of Pain was recorded, mixed, and mastered at Studio Unbound by Jonny Pettersson. It features cover art by Fredrik Ringström.
It will be released by Selfmadegod Records on CD and digitally on May 17th. Find pre-orders at the label webshop and Bandcamp via the links below. Selfmadegod recommends it for fans of Martyrdöd, Wolfbrigade, Disfear, Anaal Nathrakh, Phobia, and Nasum.
PRE-ORDER:
https://selfmadegod.com/
https://selfmadegod.bandcamp.com/album/circle-of-pain
HENRY KANE:
https://www.facebook.com/HenryKaneGrind
https://henrykanecrust.bandcamp.com/