Tungsten release Ashes tomorrow, 9 October, through Reigning Phoenix Music. It is their fifth album, and the fifth in seven years.
That rate is the thing to notice. We Will Rise in 2019, Tundra in 2020, Bliss in 2022, The Grand Inferno in 2024 and now this one. Very few bands in heavy metal keep a two year cycle past the second record, and almost none do it without the writing thinning out.
Three of the eleven songs are already out: Bite My Tongue, The North Will Rise and Sunshine of Fall, all three released across this year rather than in the month before the album. The rest run Joker, Fuego del sol, Supernova, Happy, Ted the Exorcist, For Thee, Ruin and The Forge.
Anders Johansson has played the drums in this band since it started in 2019 and Karl Johansson sings, and the line-up has not had to be rebuilt once across the five records, which is the uninteresting explanation for why they keep arriving.
What they do sits between heavy and power metal without the speed the second usually brings, and a song called Fuego del sol on a Swedish record suggests the fifth album is not narrowing.