Thirteen albums, and the oars still bite. Pushed off the shingle on 26 October 2018, three and a half years after Dawn of the Nine and one year short of the band's thirtieth birthday, The Hunt for White Christ is the thirteenth longship Unleashed have rowed out of Stockholm, eleven songs and forty-one minutes and thirty-nine seconds of Viking death metal stowed below deck like axes wrapped in oilcloth. You know this crew. You know the stroke.
The war band Johnny Hedlund founded in 1989 changed one thing for this crossing, and it was the flag on the mast. After three albums with Nuclear Blast, the quartet signed to Napalm Records in 2018 and went into Chrome Studios in Stockholm in April and May, with lead guitarist Fredrik Folkare producing and mixing and Anders Schultz behind the kit. Then "Lead Us into War" comes over the gunwale with the axe already swinging and splits the first shield in front of it clean down to the boss: a galloping riff, drums that maul, a chorus thrown out for a field full of fists, and the whole raid finished in three minutes and twenty-eight seconds. You are in the fight before you have found your oar.
The story is the fourth chapter of Hedlund's Odalheim saga, the Midgard Warriors against White Christ, picked up where Dawn of the Nine left it. Surviving armies of the enemy fall on undefended villages in the south, and the warriors arrive to find nothing but charnel smoke. "When the Midgard Warriors arrive at the village it is all too late. This exact moment is what you see in the cover artwork," Hedlund told Dead Rhetoric in an interview published on 26 November 2018. So the hunt begins. It does not stop at the border.
Hedlund also knows exactly what he refuses to build. In the same interview he put the method plainly: "we do not create riff-collections and become a band only for other guitar players so to speak. Songs that are memorable will win over other material in our world." Verse, chorus, verse, chorus. Through the first eight songs that creed drives every one of them together like iron rivets hammered through overlapping oak, plank onto plank, until the hull could take a winter sea.
"Stand Your Ground" is the proof. Three minutes and fifteen seconds, a groove with heavy metal swagger in the verse and a chorus big enough to row to. Then "Gram" turns the weather. The riffing goes bleak and black at the edges, the old Stockholm frost blowing back through the timbers, and Hedlund's guttural bark, still built for shouting orders across a battlefield, hauls the chorus up out of the dark like a net full of ice. It is the song where the saga stops being a costume and starts to bleed.
The title track is the shortest thing on board at two minutes and thirty-six seconds, and the most crowded. It charges in, then halfway through a breakdown rips the deck out from under the song, a modern tool swung on an old ship, and it works because it is over before you can argue with it. Just before it the warriors march south on "The City of Jorsala Shall Fall", and the record sounds sure of where it is going.
Here is the catch, and it sits near the stern. After the title track the stroke slackens. Not the playing, which never drops a beat, but the ideas: the black-edged riffs and the groove passages begin to trade places by rote, and "By the Western Wall" settles into a mid-paced crunch that is solid, heavy and gone before you can tell it from its neighbours. The first eight songs are a raid, the last three are the long row home.
The first eight songs are a raid, the last three are the long row home.
The polish is part of it. Folkare's sound is clean and crisp, every guitar line sharp enough to shave with and every lead flashing like a blade turned to catch the sun. I will take a clear Unleashed record over a muddy one any night of the week, but an album about slaughtered villages could carry a little more soot in the sinew. The closer, "Open to All the World", is the longest song at four minutes and forty-eight seconds and throws a bit of everything the crew carries onto the last beach, tempo changes and lead work and all. It lands. It does not haunt.
Thirteen voyages in, the longship is seaworthy, the crew is fit and the oars still bite the water. Take "Lead Us into War", "Stand Your Ground" and "Gram" and you hold one of the sharpest blades this crew has carried; sit through all eleven songs and you will feel the last stretch settle into a calm, even row. Strong at close range, tidy at a distance. Bring the first eight songs into battle and leave the rest on the beach.