Kreator: Hail To The Hordes
You could make a compelling argument that KREATOR are the world’s best thrash band. They might not have enjoyed the wider recognition of METALLICA and their big four brethren, but for the past twenty-plus years, they haven’t put a foot wrong. Their nineties output has a…questionable reputation, but ever since their return to full-blown thrash metal, they’ve only got better.
They’re one of the few bands whose post-millennium output is better than their classic era. The six-album run that started with 2001’s Violent Revolution and ended with 2022’s Hate Über Alles is damn-near perfect. Their albums are covered in violent imagery, they have music videos populated by ridiculously muscular barbarians hacking each other apart with swords, and they’re defiantly left-leaning and progressive minded. If you’re a thrash fan and you’ve never listened to KREATOR, get on it immediately. They freaking rule.
And by the time you read this, Krushers Of The World will be out. It’s their sixteenth full-length and another artificial feather in the cap of band leader Mille Petrozza. It consists of ten slices of vein-bursting, razor edged thrash metal. Yes, the title is a little silly, but you cannot argue with tracks like Seven Serpents or the monstrous Satanic Anarchy. If the last two and a half decades have taught us anything, it’s that we can always rely on KREATOR to deliver killer thrash albums. The main reason for this, is because they’re not looking backwards.
“We’re all enthusiasts, we’re all big music fans and the whole band loves metal. We have a terrific lineup right now and we’re always a band that looks forward rather than back. There’s no point staring at the past and saying ‘I wish it was 1987 again,’ those times are over. You have to make a statement for the now,” Mille tells us over Zoom.
This determination to be more than a nostalgic throwback is obvious when playing live. The bulk of their setlists are made of post-Violent Revolution tracks, and they’ve never done an anniversary tour or played one of their eighties classics in full.
“KREATOR were big in the eighties, but we’re definitely bigger now. We have albums like Pleasure To Kill and Extreme Aggression and they were very important to us, and still mean a lot to people, but I don’t want to be a nostalgia act,” he explains. “And to be honest, we don’t need to be. We have songs like Enemy Of God, Phantom Antichrist, Violent Revolution…and people love them too!”
This isn’t a pattern they’re intending to break anytime soon. When their 2026 tour kicks off, we won’t be getting a solitary token cut from Krushers Of The World followed by nine much older songs. This is a record that Mille wants the fans to hear.
“We have a lot of songs on there that I hope we can we play live. We still have to think about the old songs and including the back catalogue in our shows, but there’ll definitely be a bunch of these new songs being played on the next tour,” he says, and if Krushers Of The World sounds almost like a live record, there’s a good reason for it.
“The production is one of our best. We almost treated it like a live album, it’s something that was meant to be performed to people,” he says. “We had four weeks of rehearsals, then went to Sweden to record the actual album.”
The end result is a fast and raw sound quality. Krushers Of The World is an extremely energetic record, and it’s got the same stripped-back quality that defined their popular Hordes Of Chaos album. It’s easy to imagine that tracks like Psychotic Imperator will sound near identical when played live, while the choral vocals add a certain epic flourish.
It’s also unbelievably heavy. KREATOR have long been one of the genre’s most intense acts, but there’s a few moments here where they level up. Deathscream gets within a whisker of turning into a death metal song, and there’s a cameo from Britta Görtz of HIRAES on Tränenpalast too. This horror-inspired number is among the band’s most vicious, and Britta’s venomous pipes add an undeniably vicious edge.
For all the venom-laced lyrics and lightspeed solos though, there’s still a sentimental edge to KREATOR. The closing Loyal To The Grave is a surprisingly moving way to round the album off, and there’s a bittersweet quality to it as well. KREATOR might be at their peak, but there’s also a recognition that they might have more albums behind them than ahead, and Mille even gets a little misty-eyed when talking about his career.
“Let me put it this way: first and foremost, I see myself as a songwriter and that’s what I do. And I’m a metalhead, so I write metal songs. I started doing that in 1985 and now we have sixteen albums. Did I imagine that in ’85 that I’d be talking about KREATOR’s legacy forty years later? Of course not, but I’m happy we’re still here and releasing stuff that, to me, is relevant.”
Part of him is that music-obsessed kid from Germany’s industrial heartland, and he’s managed to spend his life as a professional metalhead. And unlike certain bands who seem happy to survive on past glories, KREATOR are as relevant today as they were in the eighties. Any advice for the younger thrashers? “Stay off the drugs, it´s a waste of time. But otherwise: GO!”
Krushers Of The World is out now via Nuclear Blast Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS127 here:
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