Album Review: Thronehammer – Slay | Kill | Erase

Album Review: Thronehammer – Slay | Kill | Erase

Reviewed by Rick Eaglestone

When Thronehammer finally delivered their debut full-length, Usurper Of The Oaken Throne, in 2019, the German British alliance was already fluent in the old language of epic doom, a dialect built on Candlemass reverence and Bathory grandeur and delivered at lengths that made most of their peers look positively timid. Incantation Rites followed in 2021, before 2023’s Kingslayer widened the lens again, letting death metal aggression and flickers of post-rock melancholy creep in around the edges. Three records, three steady steps upwards and now a fourth full-length – Slay | Kill | Erase looks to become the centre of the picture.

At the heart of it all stands Kat Shevil Gillham, a stalwart of the UK underground whose voice has become the band’s most distinctive weapon, while behind the kit Markus Ströhlein locks in with Uwe Void’s bass to give even the most spacious passages something you could comfortably build a cathedral on. Up front, West is now flanked by fellow guitarists Tobias Utz and Daniel Ringl, and that three-guitar line gives the arrangements far more room to layer and sprawl. The palette has broadened too. The battlefield heaviness is still there in the bones of these songs, but this time it shares space with a good deal more gloom and grief, and the result is the most emotionally layered thing Thronehammer have yet put their name to.

Slay | Kill | Erase opens proceedings with a title that reads like a battle order, and the track obeys it to the letter. It begins in brooding, almost reluctant fashion before the riffs arrives like siege engines rolling over a ridge, slow, deliberate and utterly unstoppable. Gillham owns the song from the first line, somewhere between a war cry and a lament, and the way the band let the tension build rather than rushing to the payoff tells you immediately that patience is going to be the currency here. A mighty opening that sets the tone for everything that follows.

To Never Return is where the record first reveals its wider horizons. Clean, chiming guitars drift in and hang in the air like mist over a battlefield at dawn, and for long stretches the band seem content simply to let the atmosphere breathe. It is the clearest early sign of that post-rock pull, yet when the weight does return it lands all the harder for having been held back. There is a genuine ache running through this one, a sense of mourning rather than menace, and it proves Thronehammer can wound just as effectively with melody as with mass.

Rise Of Resistance sees the album at its most direct, a rousing, fist-aloft doom anthem driven by a marching rhythm from Ströhlein and a riff that lodges itself in the skull on first contact. If the opening pair are about scale and mood, this is about momentum, and it scratches the classic epic doom itch in a way long-time followers will instantly recognise. Expect it to become a live staple on the band’s October run of German dates; it practically demands a room full of raised horns.

Destroyer Ov Light closes out the first half in expansive style, and it may well be the most atmospheric piece in the band’s catalogue to date. Layered guitars shimmer and swell, the rhythm section pulls back to a slow heartbeat, and Gillham shifts register to something more haunted and spectral. The arrangement conjures vast, empty landscapes, but the heaviness is never far beneath the surface, and when it finally breaks through it does so with real force. A towering, immersive centrepiece.

Blade To The Heart wastes no time reminding everyone where Thronehammer came from. After the reflective breadth of the preceding tracks, this is a proper bruiser, the riffs thick and punishing, the groove grim and grinding, with Void’s bass rumbling like distant artillery. Gillham sounds positively ferocious here, spitting out each line with venom, and the whole thing carries a stubborn, old-school conviction that recalls the band’s earliest material. Short on subtlety by design, and all the better for it.

Thrown Into The Abyss drags the listener down into the bleakest corner of the record. The tempo slows to a funereal crawl, the atmosphere thickens with dread, and there are moments where the whole song seems to buckle under its own weight. It is the kind of track that demands headphones and a darkened room, a slow suffocation rather than a sudden blow, and the way melancholic leads flicker through the gloom stops it from ever becoming one-dimensional.

Dethroned feels, fittingly for a band carrying this name, like the Thronehammer identity distilled to its essence. Heavy-footed and relentless, it balances that crushing doom weight with a sense of storytelling grandeur, the riffs rising and falling like the fortunes of some doomed monarch. It is traditional in the best possible sense, and by this stage of the album that familiarity feels less like a retreat and more like a band reclaiming home ground before the final push.

Onwards To Oblivion brings the curtain down, and it does so in spectacular fashion. The second single, it welcomes Motorowl’s Max Hemmann as guest vocalist, and the interplay between his voice and Gillham’s adds a rich new dimension, the two trading lines across a sweeping, melodic backdrop that builds towards a genuinely stirring climax. It is the most openly epic moment on the record, all soaring leads and slow-burning emotional release, and a fitting end to such a long journey. A magnificent closer. Crushing, sorrowful and strikingly bold, this is Thronehammer at the peak of their powers.

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