LIK sound as alive and mean as ever on their latest sick fuck death metal album, Necro.
Release date: April 18, 2025 | Metal Blade Records | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Stream/Purchase
Sometimes I just need some high energy shit for the sake of it so when I saw we got LIK‘s new album, I jumped on it. I knew from being familiar with their HM-2-soaked, saw-toothed game since 2018’s Carnage album that they’d give me what I needed. They’re a Swedish death metal delight, made up of members who know their way around the scene and have played in other top bands from the country like Bloodbath, Katatonia, and even Repugnant.
While they don’t have any actual connective tissue to The Crown (that I know of), they sure end up evoking a lot of similar sounds and emotions that they do, and they’re my favorite Swedes when it comes to deathier metal. That regional sound is bold and acrid – it just comes with the territory and the groundwork that greats like At The Gates ploughed and blazed decades ago. LIK sit nicely in the middle too, more deathed-up than some of their peers (I mean, their name is ‘corpse’ in Swedish), but still likely to send a greying, putrid hand out to pull in other influences when appropriate.
Necro is pit-ready, a cyclone of skin and blood hellbent on perversion. There’s a keen focus on speed and violence, nearly any song fulfilling those sick desires tenfold, but I have my faves. “Shred into Pieces” has a punk affectation with the rhythms, but the drums can also hammer out blast beats that clear out a damn room like a grenade. It’s the shortest song on the album which works in its benefit – no time wasted, no lingering enough to become unpleasant like a decaying body. I must say, I love the force and power that Tomas Åkvik puts into his voice when he says ‘fucking‘ in the first verse, it’s very punctuating.
When LIK want to groove though, they do with no trouble. The swing of “Morgue Rat” is fucking sinister – you can imagine the guitar players hanging their instruments low between their legs as they, somehow, accurately fret out the palpable melodies and sway menacingly. Easily my favorite riff on the album, and we get a little guest vocal feature from Linnea Landstedt (Tyranex, Ice Age) who I am not admittedly familiar with, but she brings a wonderful layered dynamic to the dual-sung vocals on the backend of the track. Very vile work.
“In Ruins” has a chorus that pays keen homage to their country’s origin in melodeath whereas the rest of the track has crunchy melodies and a low-key lead that stands out among the destruction along with a spoken word feature from fringe metal legend, Nick Holmes (Bloodbath, Paradise Lost). It’s a good example of how to command that death metal weight without being too technical and keeping a high tempo going. “Worms Inside” does something similar on that latter point, but with more variance and obvious melody, while “Fields of Death” devotes more of itself to melodeath’s dark, fast, and wicked style the arguably any other song on Necro, fitting for a song about how horrific war is.
Then we get “Rotten Inferno” at the end, a song that’s very much LIK, but at almost six minutes, has to offer something special, and it does. It’s a icky, gory, necrophilic tale of death and doom, lyrically and sonically as the song dips low in tempo throughout so the focus remains on the worst (complimentary… I think) lyrics of the album, reminiscent of Cannibal Corpse‘s anything-goes early era with Chris Barnes. This is Necro‘s “Female Fatal to the Flesh” for sure, a depraved end to a depraved album – at least the last thing you hear is pretty piano as the track drifts out!
Necro certainly doesn’t do much to reinvent the death metal wheel, but it’s LIK refining their sound, playing with it gleefully and morbidly. It’s the first time since 2018 that they’ve been able to get into the studio together and forge an album as a unified team (2020’s Misanthropic Breed was made under pandemic constraints, but didn’t exactly suffer from it). There is a sense of invigoration here as a result, each guitar strum more pronounced, the drums clapping harder than ever, and the vocals more serrated than before. Death metal fans – especially those with a warm, bloody hole in their hearts for the Gothenburg sound and edgy lyrics – need to peep this LP.
