Royal Destroyer

After the 2019 touring and festival season, The Crown spent a year writing and rehearsing new songs, and in November 2019 announced that rehearsals had begun for its tenth album, to be released by Metal Blade Records. Bassist Magnus Olsfelt described the aim as a sequel to Cobra Speed Venom that would push every element further. The sessions, booked for May 2020, were pushed back five months by the Covid-19 pandemic, and in October the band went into Studio Fredman in Gothenburg with producer Fredrik Nordström. On 8 October they reported the album recorded in seven days; Olsfelt said his bass parts took a couple of hours, mostly first takes. The line-up was unchanged. Of the ten songs, "Let the Hammering Begin!" is a tribute to Slayer's late guitarist Jeff Hanneman, and "Ultra Faust" takes as its theme the Faustian drive behind exploration and conquest. "Scandinavian Satan" is modelled on the first generation of black metal, Venom, Bathory and Hellhammer, and takes most of its lyrics from the Völuspá, the old Norse poem of the world's end. Olsfelt left the title open, though one reading he offered is that The Crown itself is the royal destroyer. Christian Sloan Hall, painter of the previous cover, made this one too: a golden crown above the burnt remains of a great tree, its roots intact, with an undead warrior approaching from a distant battle. Metal Blade announced the album on 14 January 2021 with a video for "Motordeath", directed and edited by Christoffer Tönnäng, and released it on 12 March 2021, the day a lyric video for "Scandinavian Satan" appeared. The CD ends with a bonus track, "Absolute Monarchy", and the limited digipak edition adds a second disc, Deathrace 13, with thirteen more tracks. Marquee / Avalon's Japanese edition (MICP-11604) came out two days earlier, on 10 March, with "Absolute Monarchy" and a demo of "Dawn of Emptiness" as tracks 11 and 12. It entered the German albums chart at 17 on 19 March 2021 for one week, the band's highest position there.