If you've never heard Live The Storm, the 2008 album from the great Swedish crust punk band Disfear, I would advise you to change that immediately. Live The Storm is an absolute beast of an album, and it remains one of my favorite heavy albums of this century. I got to see Disfear when they toured the US behind that album. They kicked ass, and I hold onto the memory. I'll never get to see them again.
Disfear got their start in the early '90s and released a handful of albums with original singer Jeppe Lerjerud. After his 1998 departure, Tomas Lindberg, from the great Swedish death metal band At The Gates, before Disfear's new lead singer. His first LP with Disfear, 2003's Misanthropic Generation, is a classic in its own right. Entombed guitarist Uffe Cederlund came aboard for Live The Storm, and that group of people reinvented classic D-beat as gleaming, fuel-injected, stadium-sized monster music, a beautiful fusion of Discharge and Motörhead.
Live The Storm was the last album that Disfear ever released. Since it came out, three of the five band members have died. Somehow, though, we're about to get one final Disfear album, one that the band recorded before the deaths of frontman Tomas Lindberg and drummer Marcus Andersson.
Once they got done touring behind Live The Storm, Disfear went relatively inactive. Bassist Henke Frykman died of cancer in 2011, and former Edge Of Sanity bassist Andreas Axelsson joined up a few years later. Lindberg reunited with At The Gates and made a series of great records. But in 2004, before Lindberg got his own cancer diagnosis, Disfear reconvened to record a new album, tracking instruments with Converge's Kurt Ballou, the producer of Live The Storm, at his Salem, Massachusetts studio and with Division Of Laura Lee's Per Stålber in Sweden.
In the time after finishing their final album, which will come out later this fall under the title The Last Nail, Disfear lost two more members. In 2025, Tomas Lindberg died of cancer at the age of 52. In his final days, he finished work on At The Gates' final LP The Ghost Of A Future Dead, which came out earlier this year. Last month, longtime Disfear drummer Marcus Andersson also passed away. With those losses in mind, I truly cannot believe we're getting another Disfear album, but it's happening. Here's what the band has to say in a press release:
Struggle, pain, and loss. Since Live The Storm, we have now lost three members of our band to cancer — Henrik, Tomas, and most recently Marcus. While we lost Henrik shortly after Live The Storm, Tomas and Marcus stayed active with us and were part of our new album, The Last Nail, which we’re announcing today. Written over the past 14 years and recorded during the past three years, we’ve been actively preparing The Last Nail over the course of the last year...
While our dear friends and bandmates Tomas, passed over a year ago, and Marcus, only a few short weeks ago, they both wanted this record to come out as quickly as possible. Before Marcus passed, he saw a final copy of the album, and we wish to share the same joy it brought him with you. Tomas and Marcus were extremely proud of their performances on this album, as we all are, and we invite you to hear their final performances on The Last Nail...
In April of 2024 during our last session together, we had a wonderful time. We didn’t think of the dark stuff. These were times of laughter. Robert Samsonowitz shot the last photos of The Last Nail lineup together at the studio. We will always cherish those times.
The first single from The Last Nail is called "Early Graves," a title that feels eerily prescient. The context surrounding its release could not possibly be heavier, but "Early Graves" has enough fired-up energy that I can listen to it without falling into a depressive fog, which is saying something. It's a searing rock 'n' roll attack, made with joyous levels of anger, and it recaptures the spirit of Live The Storm. I strongly advise you to check it out below.
TRACKLIST:
01 "A Circle Of Disease"
02 "Early Graves"
03 "Open To The Night Within"
04 "Oblivion Bound"
05 "The Revenant"
06 "Shackled To Our Vice"
07 "Cyanide"
08 "The Last Nail In The Last Coffin On Earth"
The Last Nail is out 11/20 on Relapse. Pre-order it here.
