Artist: Unleashed
Country: Sweden
Label: Century Media
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2025
In some of my previous reviews I already touched upon it, the way how you perceive an album (or a band as a whole) has not only to do with your personal taste in music. It also comes with a heavy package of different things: your current state of mind when listening, the musical climate in which the music lands, your whole frame of references, your background in a specific musical genre. The list goes on…
Recently I’ve had more than one discussion about specific Death Metal records that came out in a period the genre was as dead as possibly could, truly living up to its name. The decade roughly between 1995 and 2005 was a stretch of time in which the quality of Death Metal was rather poor. Only exception perhaps was the more USA-based Grindcore-minded Brutal Death Metal which celebrated a peak in popularity. But such a period also subconsciously stains how you view that genre in general and possibly also how the albums released during that period are experienced. There were many albums that were received rather lukewarmly – or worse. In hindsight, not all of that was justified. Even those “worst” albums by Deicide, Obituary or Malevolent Creation aren’t all that bad, try it.
However, I have always felt that much of that sentiment stuck with Unleashed. If you listen back to their discography, you could argue that the albums from the aforementioned period are of somewhat lesser quality, but the main conclusion is that Unleashed has been a remarkably consistent band. Admittedly, a band that never received the recognition of their contemporaries such as Grave and especially Dismember and Entombed, but imperceptibly a band that simply continued to do its own thing. Something that perhaps deserves more appreciation than anything else.
With ‘Fire Upon Your Lands’, the these stubborn Swedes present their new album, and, as expected, this fifteen offering is basically a repetition of what they have been doing over the past few years – decades even. One of the secrets of such a meticulous consistency lies with the fact that these guys are already playing in the same line-up since 1995. That means that every new album feels like an annual family reunion; you know everybody, but still you’re curious what they have to tell and what haircut everybody has. In the end, everything seems to be just the same as last year, but you had a good time. That’s how ‘Fire Upon Your Lands’ sounds, it’s cranking out the same rolling and grooving Death Metal with Johnny Hedlund’s trademark roar. It may pass by without any real highlights, but there is not a moment that you are bored with it. Even when I heard the album about ten times, sometimes a few spins in succession, it doesn’t bore me at all.
This all shows that listening to music and the way you process it has as much to do with expectations and sentiment as with musical taste or rational argumentation. Maybe the first is even more important. Unleashed might be the best example of what you could label as “feel good Death Metal”.
