Swedish genre agitators HAERDSMAELTA have released ‘City Of The Dead’ as a new single today (25th September) via Icons Creating Evil Art. The third track to be issued ahead of an upcoming album by the band entitled ‘HAERDROCK’, it offers an uncompromising glimpse into a record shaped by political frustration, environmental anxiety and the absurd contradictions of modern life.
Blending the abrasive force of hardcore and metal with industrial repetition and post-punk tension, ‘City Of The Dead’ imagines a society built on the remains of all that came before it. Its streets still glow and its machinery keeps running, but beneath the surface lie buried generations of achievement, failure, knowledge and prejudice.
At its centre is the brutally effective refrain ‘We built this city on rot and mould’ – a deliberate desecration of Starship’s ‘We Built This City (on Rock and Roll)’ and one of a number of examples of HAERDSMAELTA twisting familiar cultural phrases into something darker and more confrontational.
But the image of rot and mould is not simply an accusation. The song considers how the present is constructed from the remains of the past, both good and bad. History is carried on our backs, elevating us through accumulated knowledge and experience, or weighing us down due to inherited injustice or prejudice.
“Wherever we stand and whatever we do, we are lifted or weighed down by our past,” the band explain. “The cities we build today are built upon the rotting remains of yesterday – and that is also a fantastic thing. Within those remains lie generations of experience and knowledge that could potentially lift us higher. We just need to cherish that more and remember what we are and where we come from.”
HAERDSMAELTA | photo by Simon Wettervik & Helena Eriksson
‘City Of The Dead’ also takes aim at the illusion of historical utopias; imagined golden ages that some continue to pursue but which never truly existed. Beneath their nostalgic surfaces are often the same prejudice, decadence and exclusion that contributed to the present crisis. The past cannot be recreated, escaped or discarded. Rather, it must be understood.
The repeated song command to ‘tear it down’ therefore offers no simple liberation. Giving way to a darker instruction to ‘keep building’, destruction and reconstruction become part of the same endless cycle. Structures may fall, but the values that created them survive unless something is learned from their remains. “The problem is that we are such a spoiled, arrogant and ungrateful species. We need some serious scolding – and a good old slap across our collective face,” the band add.
Their message never comes at the expense of impact. ‘City Of The Dead’ is confrontational, physical and built around repetition that becomes increasingly oppressive. Its collision of punk urgency, metallic weight, post-punk bleakness and industrial momentum captures the central tension in the band’s music; the urge to dance, shout and move while everything appears to be falling apart.
HAERDSMAELTA | photo by Simon Wettervik & Helena Eriksson
‘City Of The Dead’ follows the previously released ‘Enjoy The Feast’ and ‘The Kids Are Alt-Right’, each revealing a different facet of the ‘HAERDROCK’ album. The former confronted excess, consumption and complicity, while the latter examined the fear that spreads through established power structures when the people beneath them begin to mobilise and answer back.
Together, the three singles establish the new album as a furious examination of anti-intellectualism, extremism, consumerism, environmental destruction, guilt and anxiety. HAERDSMAELTA approach these subjects without separating political violence from everyday life. The album’s world is recognisable because its most grotesque features have already become normal
