Eternal Death

After the 1995 debut The Burning, Crown of Thorns went back into Berno Studio in 1996 to record a second album. The line-up was unchanged: Johan Lindstrand on vocals, Marko Tervonen and Marcus Sunesson on guitars, Magnus Olsfelt on bass and Janne Saarenpää on drums. The band produced it with Berno Paulsson, with Henrik Larson as assistant engineer, and Göran Finnberg mastered it at the Mastering Room together with the band. Kristian Wåhlin, known as Necrolord, again provided the cover artwork. The album holds ten songs and runs 52 minutes and 28 seconds. "Kill (The Priest)" goes back to 1991, before the demos, and was reworked for this record; it was still in the band's live set in 2014. "The Black Heart", more than eight minutes long, is dedicated to Dead of Mayhem, and the closing "Death of God" runs past ten minutes. Olsfelt is credited as a writer on nine of the ten songs and Tervonen on five; Tervonen has said the band played its first four albums in standard E tuning. A video was made for "Angels Die", and in 1997 songs from the album went out on several samplers, "In Bitterness and Sorrow" among them on Nuclear Blast's Soundcheck series. Black Sun Records released the album on CD in February 1997, catalogue number BS 010, and it was the last record the band put out as Crown of Thorns. In July 1997 pressure from an American Christian glam band of the same name forced them to shorten the name to The Crown; a review of the time reported that the other band, fronted by Jean Beauvoir, had threatened legal action. Black Sun added a picture-disc LP in 1998, and Century Media's American reissue of 2002, credited to The Crown, carries the "Angels Die" video.