Surgical Steel

This is the first Carcass studio album since Swansong in 1996. Nuclear Blast released it on 13 September 2013 in Europe, on the 16th in the United Kingdom and on the 17th in North America. It is the first record they made as a three-piece since Symphonies of Sickness in 1989, and the first to reach the top fifty of the British album chart. The reunion began in 2007 as a live band: Jeff Walker and Bill Steer with Michael Amott, and Daniel Erlandsson of Arch Enemy on drums. Walker said at the time that no new album would come of it. While touring in 2008, though, Steer watched Dan Wilding play and heard something of Ken Owen, who had been unable to return after a cerebral haemorrhage in 1999. When Amott and Erlandsson left in 2012 for Arch Enemy, Steer and Walker brought Wilding in and paid for the recording themselves, having no label behind them; Owen sings backing vocals on it. What came out sets the melody of Heartwork beside the roughness of the grindcore records before it, and the song titles went back to the vocabulary of anatomy and the slaughterhouse. "Captive Bolt Pistol" was heard first in June 2013 on a covermount CD from the German magazine Legacy, given away as a download on 16 July and pressed as a 7-inch single in early August. The order here is the standard eleven-track pressing.