THE CROWN – CROWN OF THORNS GATEFOLD IRON GREY MARBLED LP + 7″

Crown Of Thorns serves as the band’s twelfth studio album as THE CROWN and is the dynamic, groundbreaking follow-up to 2021’s Royal Destroyer. The band made distinctly different creative choices to ensure that the LP’s ten songs would stand as a unique collection. “For me, Cobra Speed Venom and Royal Destroyer are like siblings,” says guitarist Marko Tervonen. “[We wanted] to make sure that we would take a step forward, get a bit more out of our comfort zone on Crown Of Thorns. We really wanted this to sound like a new, fresh album and I believe we did it.”

The approach was full circle and inventive. “I had the idea that we should work a bit backwards. 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 proved inspirational, as THE CROWN focused on the music that most complimented the piece. “I wanted something really fast, melodic, heavy, epic, punky,” explains Tervonen, “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.“

Musical dynamics are also on a new level with the 2022 addition of drummer Mikael Norén and bassist Mattias Rasmussen as well as the return of lead guitarist Marcus Sunesson, rejoining longtime 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,’ which turned out great. This is definitely a step up in many ways, changing the way we worked on the CSV and RD albums.”

Another change is the guitar tuning: “We decided to tune up to D from C,” Tervonen points out. “We played standard E tuning on our four first albums, then we slowly went over to D and from Possessed 13 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.”

The outcome of the revitalized process and personnel is evident on the first single, “Churchburner.” “‘Churchburner’ starts out with a nod to ‘Postmortem’ [Slayer] but then explodes into quite a different type of monster,” notes Tervonen. “It has a great groove to it, and it basically has a tempo/beat that we don’t use that often. It’s mostly in triplets. It’s a very strong song with Johan being on fire here and Marcus adds a killer solo as well.”