Truth be told, I haven’t really kept tabs on Wolfbrigade over the years. The LPs and 7″s I have already serve their purpose well enough whenever I’m in the mood for a hardened dose of metallised crust, but there gets to be a point where you only need so much, especially when there’ve been Framtid, Skitkids and Herätys to distract me along the way. Unsurprisingly, ‘Damned’ doesn’t veer too far from the path laid down on cuts like ‘Allday Hell’ or ‘Progression / Regression’: there’s plenty of surging metallic thunder to weather, gravelly vocals to contend with and the kind of production that deftly slips a hood over your head before setting about your torso with a bike chain. Things are perhaps a bit more melodic than I remember them, but we’re only talking the occasional daub rather than any sort of descent into epi-crust drudgery. If the praise sounds faint so far then it really isn’t meant us such – ‘Damned’ is as fine a result as you could hope for and easily outperforms many bands who’re a fraction of this lot’s age. So, then, if you fancy another one to sling alongside all the Avskum, Skitsystem and Doom albums you already have or are turning up late to the party with a two-litre bottle of White Lightning it’s all good and it’s all reassuringly gnarly – just know from the outset that what you see is what you get and don’t be expecting the kind of haemhorrage-inducing excitement you might be able to find elsewhere.