Heroes

This is the seventh album by the band from Falun, released by Nuclear Blast on 16 May 2014. Most of the line-up had left after the previous record, and this is the first with guitarists Chris Rorland and Thobbe Englund and drummer Hannes van Dahl. Peter Tagtgren produced it at Abyss Studios; Peter Sallai painted the cover and Ryan Garrison took the photographs. Par Sundstrom has said the idea was to write about individuals rather than large battles -- people who went beyond what duty asked and put themselves in danger for others. "Night Witches" is the Soviet night bomber regiment, "No Bullets Fly" the Luftwaffe pilot who let a crippled bomber go, "Inmate 4859" the man who had himself sent into Auschwitz, and "Smoking Snakes" three soldiers of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force. That last one began when Sundstrom searched for the German word Helden while researching and found the story of the Drei Brasilianische Helden. Joakim Broden and Sundstrom wrote the words together and Broden the music, apart from "Inmate 4859" with Tagtgren and "Soldier of 3 Armies" with Englund. The singles were "To Hell and Back" on 14 March and "Resist and Bite" on 2 May. The order here is the ten tracks of the standard European pressing; other editions add "7734" and "Man of War" among others, and the Japanese one runs to fourteen.