Release Date 21.08.2026
Format CD/LP/Digital
Genre Death Metal
Origin Sweden
Nekrodawn was formed in Sweden in 2022, bringing together four musicians with deep roots in the country’s extreme metal scene. Jonas Kjellgren handles vocals and guitar, Mika Lagrén plays guitar, Johan Jansson takes care of bass and backing vocals, while Henrik Axelsson is behind the drums. Their backgrounds include names such as Grave, Centinex, Interment, The Crown, Hypocrisy, Carnal Forge, Scar Symmetry and Facebreaker, giving the band a long history within death metal without making Nekrodawn simply a side project built around old credits. Their debut, "Sculpted By Torture", appeared in 2024 through Legions Of Bane, establishing the band with a hard, death metal approach.
"Covenant Of Carnage" is the second full length and arrives through War Anthem Records, with twelve songs covering forty six minutes. The album was recorded between 2023 and 2025 in several locations, with Henrik Axelsson recording the drums at home, while guitars, bass and vocals were handled at Blacklounge Studio by Jonas Kjellgren, with additional guitars recorded by Mika Lagrén. Kjellgren also produced, mixed and mastered the album. The production has a larger and more organic character than the debut, while the performances retain a human edge, with no vocal copying or drum editing used during the production.
Musically, Nekrodawn works with Swedish death metal as the core, adding blackened colour, occasional D-beat movement and touches that bring the songs outside a strictly conventional death metal formula. The guitars move between blunt riffing, melodic details and darker passages, while the vocals sit deeper into the music with enough variation to give the lyrical material more presence. The themes revolve around carnage, oppression, greed, pestilence, deceit, destruction and a bleak view of existence, reflected directly in titles such as "Feeding The Greed Machine", "Condemned To Existence" and "Desolation Reigns".
The songwriting is compact and riff centred, with tempo changes giving the album room to shift from fast attacks to heavier mid tempo sections. The production also benefits from analog mixing, giving the instruments a more physical presence while retaining the rough character expected from this style. "Covenant Of Carnage" is a focused death metal album with enough variation across its running time to prevent the formula from becoming flat. Nekrodawn keeps the arrangements rooted in riffs and percussion, allowing the guitars to carry much of the atmosphere through dark melodies and abrasive patterns.
The vocals approach has also developed, with Jonas Kjellgren using a somewhat less guttural delivery than before, making the lyrics easier to follow. The result is an album that sits between Swedish death metal tradition and a darker extreme metal approach, with a production that gives the material more scale than the debut. Cover art by Mitchell Nolte reflects the same tone, decayed and grim, with nothing left to explain. Anyone already listening to Bloodbath, Skeletal Remains or Vomitory has good reason to check this one out, even though the second album never fully steps outside the scene it grew from.
|8.5
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