Wolf release Hour of the Wolf on 20 November, their tenth album, and Death Satellite, the song that opens it, is out first.
Niklas Stalvind gives the brief they set themselves, and it is a physical one. “We wanted to make an album that could sit on one side of a ninety minute cassette, just like albums used to,” he says. “Our goal was to create an album you want to listen to from beginning to end and then listen to again. I think we managed it.”
The band formed in Sweden in 1995, when traditional heavy metal was treated as a corpse, and spent the next decade being one of the reasons it was not. Nine albums later the description that follows them around is pioneers of the new wave of traditional heavy metal, and they have never once tried to sound modern or, just as pointedly, retro.