Grand Design

Grand Design followed just a year later, on 16 May 2000, on Z Records. Thomas Thorsén still sings, and the sound is more direct — the ornament stripped back so that what the band actually plays comes forward. Where this record sits is clearer in hindsight. It was the last album Damned Nation made along their existing line. In the autumn of 2001 Thorsén left: he had just become a father and felt he could not find the time or the commitment the band needed. Recording of the next album was put on ice while they looked for a successor, and from there the band went somewhere else.