Band:	Håndgemeng
Album:	Satanic Panic Attack
Style:	Sludge metal, Stoner metal
Release date:	April 11, 2025
A review by:	musclassia

01. The Cauldron Born
02. Medieval Knievel
03. Satanic Panic Attack
04. A Path Less Traveled
05. Earthwoman
06. The Sundrinker
07. Down Below
08. Supermoon

It’s cute to see a band comfortable being as intimate with one another as Håndgemeng seemingly are based off of that album cover; it must be all the devil worshipping.

The Nords appear to have given up on the ‘stonercore’ genre tag that felt minimally applicable to their mostly hardcore-free debut album Ultraritual, as the label’s Bandcamp page for Satanic Panic Attack declares that Håndgemeng are ‘no longer constrained by genre or expectations’. On this sophomore record, the group explore the ‘Satanic panic’ hysteria of the 80s, but in doing so they further evolve their take on stoner metal to draw from a number of influences, in doing so pushing both the driving heaviness and psychedelic tranquillity of their music.

The former of those vibes is explored first on the record; the vocals from Martin Wennberg across the record predominantly take a harsher, raspy form, and this style in combination with the slick riffs that take aspects from both desert rock and arena anthems lends opening track “The Cauldron Born” a feel very much reminiscent of a stoner-ified Kvelertak. The vibe is sustained over into “Medieval Knievel”, which has a more bruising and fuzzy guitar tone, but also plenty of fun stoner licks abound at the same time.

This opening duo of tracks do have a fair amount of similarity in approach, but from that point onwards, Håndgemeng get more adventurous with the styles that they explore. The title track has a swagger to its main riff that harks back to 70s hard rock such as Alice Cooper and Aerosmith, but it has a laidback psychedelic bridge (featuring the album’s first clean vocals) that goes in a direction that the subsequent remainder of the album repeatedly follows. The slick desert rock of “A Path Less Travelled” (in which the rasps of past tracks are replaced by booming stoner roars) is one of several songs on Satanic Panic Attack that remind me in different ways of Weedpecker and comparable psychedelic stoner rock/metal bands, and after the driving rhythm of the opening tracks, it’s enjoyable to be faced with a more languid mood here.

The greatest exploration of Weedpecker-esque psychedelia happens in the songs “The Sundrinker” and 7-minute closer “Supermoon”; the former punctuates fun doomy riffs with spacious, reverbing passages fuelled by mind-altering substances, while the latter begins in dreamy, wah-wah fashion but ultimately builds towards a frenetic display of guitar soloing and duelling in its closing stages that exhibits the band’s impressive instrumental chops. It makes for a blistering conclusion, and leaves one wandering whether Håndgemeng could have got their shred game on a tad more during the preceding tracks.

No individual song is particularly original in its approach here (although there remains a freshness to the ‘desert Kvelertak’ feel of the opening tracks), but the combination of each approach together makes Satanic Panic Attack a far more engaging and entertaining stoner rock/metal album than most of what the rest of the scene is currently capable of. Much like on Ultraritual, their music is written with a memorability and a sense of real fun that makes it effortlessly likeable and high in replay value.