You can trust Louder
Studded leather hats off to Niklas Stålvind for keeping Swedish true metal squad Wolf on an upward trajectory from their earliest jams in the mid-90s, when playing mid-80s-style metal with gleeful abandon was widely chided as juvenile.
He’s the only member left from those formative years, but seventh album Devil Seed proves his perseverance well-founded. Although occasionally Wolf over-plough their furrow with unexceptional results, Devil Seed is a far more varied and rounded, and rather darker, album than usual, with a faint experimental streak – see the quirky Spanish guitar solo in Skeleton Woman or the ethereal Eastern moods of The Dark Passenger. Once again the production sparkles and the instrumentation is incisive but never indulgent, with Shark Attack, My Demon and Killing Floor boasting simple, surging choruses that’ll have you screaming along.
Via Century Media
Chris has been writing about heavy metal since 2000, specialising in true/cult/epic/power/trad/NWOBHM and doom metal at now-defunct extreme music magazine Terrorizer. Since joining the Metal Hammer famileh in 2010 he developed a parallel career in kids' TV, winning a Writer's Guild of Great Britain Award for BBC1 series Little Howard's Big Question as well as writing episodes of Danger Mouse, Horrible Histories, Dennis & Gnasher Unleashed and The Furchester Hotel. His hobbies include drumming (slowly), exploring ancient woodland and watching ancient sitcoms.