Wolfbrigade - Run With The Hunted album review

Equal parts Discharge, Motörhead and Nihilist, the now-classic Swedish discore sound has seldom been more lethal than in the hands of these veterans. As with fellow countrymen Disfear, Wolfbrigade have been making records that sound almost exactly like this for over 20 years and you really don’t need to read the label on the tin to know what’s inside. That said, five years have passed since the tooth-shattering Damned, and while Run With The Hunted is no kind of radical departure, it is noticeably heavier and more meticulously constructed than its predecessor. Songs like Nomad Pack and Lucid Monomania rattle along on textbook d-beats, but it’s the subtle death metal churn that lurks beneath the riffs that makes this ever-so-slightly more than just a dewy-eyed salute to Stoke’s finest. There are nods to Slayer on the marauding Feral Blood and to old-school hard rock on the closing Dead Cold – both moments confirming that blurring the lines between several undeniably great things remains one of heavy music’s brightest ideas.