Blood Command: Welcome To The Next Level

World Domination. You can’t get much more of a bold statement of intent than that, but that’s exactly what Norwegian “death pop” outfit BLOOD COMMAND are aiming for, titling their latest, 20-song opus that and covering seemingly every single musical base they’ve ever drawn on. When we sit down over Zoom with vocalist Nikki Brumen, who joined them on last year’s excellent Praise Armageddonism, she’s warm, enthusiastic about the work they’re about to release to the world, and secure in the knowledge that – as far they’re concerned – this is the most BLOOD COMMAND record they’ve ever made.

It wasn’t without its upheaval though; when she joined the band for their previous record, she was still living in Australia and negotiating the dissolution of her previous band, PAGAN amongst other personal trials. It was the right time and the right opportunity though, and she moved halfway round the world to join the band and write what became World Domination. “I sold heaps of clothes, all my furniture, and moved in May 2022,” she reminisces. “I love it here, but you don’t really know how hard something will be until you give everything away and move somewhere totally new. But I’d never go back!”

When she did eventually move, while guitarist Yngve Andersen is their main songwriter, she made clear that though she’d sung his lyrics for Praise Armageddonism given when she joined, what came next had to be her own. “It was an amazing experience to record those songs because I love them, but it was really difficult because I have to say my own words,” she explains. It led to a big shift, for BLOOD COMMAND at least; “he’d tried to write with other people, and he couldn’t, they just didn’t gel.” But, the night he and Nikki sat down after practice, it was entirely different.

“The minute we sat down, we started bouncing ideas off each other and we wrote so well together,” she grins at the memory. “We totally got each other’s point of view and where we’re coming from. We both write the same way, we love using metaphor in the same way. Even before I joined the band, I was writing that way in PAGAN – it was just another weird sign it was meant to be all along!” One listen to World Domination and that’s plain; covering a multitude of genres, it’s the boldest they’ve ever been.

Before they’d even released their first single from it though, they surprised the world with two BELINDA CARLISLE covers (“me and Yngve both love 80s pop ballads! It’s something we’ve bonded over a lot in drunken nights after rehearsal”) that still sounded like the band, and in a weird way, laid the groundwork for what was to come. By showcasing a poppier side to the band that perhaps was more often relegated to their huge choruses rather than entire songs, it was another teaser that the band were about to do something that people likely didn’t expect from them.

In fact, they’re so proud of the album that Nikki doesn’t particularly care what the reception to it is; “I think people are gonna love it or hate it,” she smirks. “It’s my dream record. It has the pop side, it has the heavy side, and we didn’t leave a single stone unturned.” In fact, there were moments they spent hours poring over specific words. Reap What You Sow is a 36-second blast of grindcore-flecked punk, but it took them “two writing sessions of four hours each” just to write the lyrics. The dedication to perfection is palpable.

While BLOOD COMMAND have always delved into cults and “religious movements” (they call their fans the Awake Team, a play on the Heaven’s Gate movement that called its followers the Away Team), and Nikki herself has always had an interest (PAGAN used Pagancult on their social media handles, and she also wrote about them), World Domination sees that influence writ large. It even extends to the band’s attire, clad in Adidas tracksuits and titling the album’s first song The Band With the Three Stripes.

The song names are even more direct; Heaven’s Hate, a minute of abrasive hardcore, is only one letter removed, while Decades references the shoes Heaven’s Gate followers were wearing when they died by mass suicide – Nike Decades. There’s references scattered throughout their discography, too; Yngve himself “grew up in what was almost a cult, a religious movement. When he started BLOOD COMMAND, he wanted it to be us, in terms of the band and fans, against the world.” Both Andersen and Nikki have held a longstanding fascination with the Heaven’s Gate movement, too, Nikki visiting the Museum of Death in Hollywood and seeing the real bunk beds that the followers of Heaven’s Gate died in.

Expanding on the notion of cults into the album, many claim to strive for that domination and leadership, but to Nikki, most importantly, it represents the many facets of the band people are now hearing. As we wrap our time together, she’s reminiscing that BLOOD COMMAND came to her at a pivotal point, and its themes of loss and unrequited love are writ large across it, along with, she grins, the “we’re the shit, you are not, fuck you” songs that balance out the vulnerability and show that it’s possible for us to move past such monumental losses and to thrive again once more.

World Domination is out now via Hassle Records/Loyal Blood Records. 

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