Band:	Impaled Nazarene
Album:	Eight Headed Serpent
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	May 2021

01. Goat Of Mendes
02. Eight Headed Serpent
03. Shock And Awe
04. The Nonconformists
05. Octagon Order
06. Metastasizing And Changing Threat
07. Debauchery And Decay
08. Human Cesspool
09. Apocalypse Pervertor
10. Triumphant Return Of The Antichrist
11. Unholy Necromancy
12. Mutilation Of The Nazarene Whore
13. Foucault Pendulum

Impaled Nazarene by the numbers is still great music by the numbers. After 7 years of silence, they are even somewhat more pissed off this time around.

Nostalgic disclaimer: Impaled Nazarene made me start listening to extreme metal, I think Ugra-Karma is one of the best albums ever released, and they have always been one of my favourite bands. Contrary to his usual claim to fame, to me, Alexi Laiho was always the guitarist who got scared off by the politically incorrect content on Nihil. We'll see whether this makes me the right person or too biased for this gig. 12-year-old Netzach had little good to say about life, the world, and people around him, so the simplistically spiteful music and unapologetically provocative lyrics became a "discomfort zone" wherein hate felt not only acceptable and justified, but could even be a lot of fun. Mika Luttinen's mind seems perpetually stuck in the split second before striking back against everything that he despises, and in contrast to many other black metal lyricists, his texts are usually framed with just enough self-distance to make me believe he might not be exaggerating, even though his own opinion is usually that "brutal music needs brutal lyrics".

Opener (and mandatory goat song) "Goat Of Mendes" is a stellar example of how not to open an album. The single edit of it was just fine; a short, sweet and speedy tremolo assault with a gang shout-backed chorus. The album edit is one minute longer on account of a properly NSFW sample about "oral sex demons" that was funny once or maybe twice. The actual content shouldn't shock any listener of Impaled Nazarene, but at least on Latex Cult they had the decency to put the nuisance of an intro as a separate track.

Enough about that. Gang shouts, snarled screaming, three-chord riffs, and an overall grind-tinged punk attitude drive many of the songs on Eight Headed Serpent, making it stylistically closer to their mid-90s albums than to most of their later output, though the last two albums have gravitated back towards this from their more melodic style of the early 2000s. The band sounds re-energised thanks to some truly hard rocking riffs, such as the chorus in "Shock And Awe" and following Motörhead-worshipping "The Nonconformists", which also contains the perfect example of what this band is all about. Halfway through the song, the thankfully always prominent bass guitar bridges the song into a glorious section where Mika, backed by the band, spurts out: "We are from Finland / You can fuck off / We are Impaled Nazarene / Go get fucked / Suomi vitun Finland / Finland vitun perkele". Equally brutal, self-aware and hilarious, very few bands could pull off this sort of iconic moment with a straight face.

The following songs follow a similar template, being at their best when veering closer to hardcore punk than to black metal, and after a while sadly blending together somewhat in between standout moments such as the trademark blood-curdling screams bookending "Debauchery And Decay", the untiring grind number "Human Cesspool", and the mid-paced, melodic finisher "Foucault Pendulum" about "flat Earth retards".

Eight Headed Serpent sounds more focused than Manifest and more inspired than both Road To The Octagon and Vigorous And Liberating Death, which makes it this band's best output since 2006's excellent Pro Patria Finlandia and places it decently above average in Impaled Nazarene's discography. I know these guys can do better, but it is a damn entertaining album, and just in case they ask around... do me a favour and give them my old address, will you?