Horndal: Fighting The Good Fight
Last time we spoke to Henrik and Pontus Levahn the brothers were gearing up to release Lake Drinker – the 2021 sophomore full-length from their self-proclaimed ‘rust metal’ band HORNDAL. It was a killer record they had every right to be excited about, though few could have predicted quite how far things would go for the band in the three years between the release of that record and the follow-up they now present to the world in Head Hammer Man.
“For us it was crazy in Sweden,” smiles Henrik. “We ended up on Dagens Nyheter – it’s like The Times or something – on the front page, and that never happens to metal bands, they don’t write about metal. We ended up in a lot of classy fine culture places, and then of course we played at Copenhell in Copenhagen, that was the biggest thing maybe.”
“We just expected to continue to be a dirty basement band – which we still are in all regards – but that was really crazy and it opened a lot of doors for us,” adds Pontus. “It’s really exciting to see where the next one can take us. Hopefully we can take that step over the border, more than just to Copenhagen, which is like a centimetre from Sweden.”
The mission hasn’t changed though; HORNDAL – whose line-up is completed by guitarist Fredrik Boethius and new bassist Daniel Ekeroth – are named after their hometown and every album they’ve released so far has told stories of exactly that. On Lake Drinker it was of the very real threat of Google draining the town’s lake and laying waste to its surrounding environment; on the band’s 2019 debut before it, it was of the closure of the town’s steel mill and the economic decline that followed in the 1970s; and now on Head Hammer Man it is of the forgotten hero Alrik Andersson, who led Horndal’s ironworkers in the Great Strike of 1909 and was ultimately exiled from his country because of it.
The story came to Henrik’s attention soon after the release of Lake Drinker, and he quickly realised it was a thread he’d have to pull. “Pontus says that we’re playing ‘four eyes’ metal – it’s for nerdy historian geeks, but it’s quite close to that,” he laughs. “I’ve been digging in archives all around Sweden. I opened an ancestry account to do some [research], and then I found [Andersson’s granddaughter] Holly Stacho, who is 76 years old living in Los Angeles. She became my best friend and we had lots of Zoom meetings. She knew everything about his story in America, but he never told anybody about what happened in Sweden.”
Whilst Henrik immersed himself so fully in the research that he actually ended up writing a book about Andersson’s life – to be published on the same day as the album’s release in both English and Swedish – Pontus took the lead on the music. Like his brother, he took the task immensely seriously, drawing from the full breadth of his record collection – everything from jazz to krautrock and apparently even to his kids’ favourite songs – to craft the band’s most diverse record to date.
“If it’s us writing the songs and us playing it’s gonna sound like HORNDAL anyway,” he emphasises. “And I think the problem is more that everything sounds the same. I listen to a lot of newer metal albums and it’s like I can’t tell the songs apart, so I really didn’t want that to happen.”
“You always get so annoyed with bands saying ‘you can’t really put us in a specific genre’, but then the question gets asked to you and you’re the same,” he continues when pressed on how he’d define the music of HORNDAL. “Henrik and I jokingly say we play speed-doom. It’s like doom but it’s not as slow, but it’s not fast, so speed-doom! And then on the new album we have these heroic harmonised guitars and stuff like that so it’s like ‘adult-oriented death metal’ but that’s just stupid. I think if there’s one band all of us can really agree on, that’s boringly enough BLACK SABBATH… We play riff-based music and that’s a band that all of us started liking when we were children.”
For Henrik, the definition is less about genres and influences and ultimately has far more to do with emotion. “It’s anger and sadness, or anger and melancholy,” he elaborates. “I actually have some problems singing these songs without bursting into tears. I had that situation when we played a very big venue [where] we were opening for IN FLAMES in August in Sweden, like the biggest venue we played in actually, and we played the title track Head Hammer Man for the first time and I almost burst into tears. I couldn’t do it. Because coming from Horndal, it’s a sad place and it fills me and I guess a lot of people with anger and sadness.”
It is all quite literally so close to home for the Levahn brothers; the picture they paint of Horndal today is one of empty houses, closing businesses and residents in limbo as they wait for Google to make its mind up. Meanwhile, unions across Sweden – including the Ironworking Union to which Andersson once belonged – are embroiled in a fresh dispute with Elon Musk’s Tesla over better wages and benefits for mechanics in the company’s repair shops; the names might change but the story so often remains the same, which is exactly what makes a band like this and a record like Head Hammer Man important not just to Horndal, nor even just to Sweden, but to forgotten towns and struggling workers the world over.
Head Hammer Man is out now via Prosthetic Records.
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