HELVETETS PORT Warlords SLIPCASE [CD]

High Roller Records, 16 pages booklet, slipcase, Gothenburg’s Helvetets Port issued their debut album »Exodus To Hell« on High Roller Records in 2009, followed by the »Man With The Chains« EP a year later. They returned with »From Life To Death« in 2019 before being stopped in their tracks by the global pandemic, like most other bands. Singer Witchfinder explains the situation: “We didn’t have much time to play concerts between the last album release and the point when the pandemic came. We did however play one of the very first shows in Sweden after the restrictions were lifted! Otherwise we’ve been fiddling with new songs. It might not be as quick of a follow-up album as we would have wanted, but hey, at least we made it twice as quickly as last time! Or half as slowly ...” Of course we are talking abut the brand record »Warlords«, which is a clear progression in comparison to the first two albums of the Swedes. Witchfinder continues: “With the release of »From Life To Death« we exhausted most of the material we had written up until then, which included a lot of older stuff. This time around basically every part is newly written, save for the fact that it is five years between the albums, so not all super new in that sense. But like I often say, we’re not a band that needs to be in with the times. If a song takes zero or five years to come out, it would be just as dated.” In other words: Helvetets Port’s style is timeless, sticking to the strict paradigm of traditional heavy metal music, but always trying to retain its individuality. “We delved deep into the dungeons of melancholic obscurity with »From Life To Death«,” characterizes Witchfinder the band’s last record and compares it to the new one “and now we felt like a change of pace. The sound on »Warlords« is more towards 1984 than 1981. It generally has a post-apocalyptic theme and the songs are a bit more straight forward. Although straight forward when it comes to Helvetets Port might still be considered progressive by someone else ...” “Mutant March”, “2049”, “Legions Running Wild” – »Warlords« consists of some high-class material – but the pick of the bunch possibly is “Golden Axe”, coming across like a mixture of classic Heavy Load and Omen. “That’s a big compliment!,“beams the singer, “Heavy Load have always been a big influence and to an extent Omen. ‘Golden Axe’ is the only ‘medieval’ song on the album, so we are letting you know we have not left that topic.”