Album Review: LIK – Necro (Metal Blade Records)

LIK – the modern day purveyors of classic Swedish death metal – gloriously return to action with their fourth album ‘Necro’ via Metal Blade on April 18th, 2025.

What year is it!? You could be forgiven for thinking you had somehow gone back in time to a point where classic death metal had multitudes of heavy metal fans discovering a whole new and colder part of the world. What was your first taste of the Swedish death metal scene? Chances are, if you’re a musician, it will have influenced you in some way or another, but I’d wager that no-one has been influenced in quite the way LIK has.

That’s not to make fun of the extreme metal band, far from it. It’s just impossible to talk about the ripping, roaring, and head banging qualities of this album without referencing the scene as a whole. LIK aren’t just carrying the torch, they’ve adding even more fuel to the fire in dangerous fashion.

Death metal through and through, which makes this a hard sell to detractors of the style, Necro is ten brutish examples of what happens when a talented group of musician’s lock in and agree to create music that devastates the mind, body, and soul. Sometimes manic, sometimes focused, sometimes progressive, always heavy, but not lacking in harmony; from the word go, the record will leave you seeing stars.

Notably, the album is at its most diverse when it comes to tempo, but that doesn’t affect the intensity one bit. It just helps the album flow better and ensures track bleed doesn’t really happen.

Then, if all that wasn’t enough to make this a raucous must listen for all fans of extreme, the lyrics draw from a plethora of interesting subjects. From monsters under cities, parasitic worms, necrophilia, massacres, war, murder, zombies, and more. It might seem ‘par for the course’ as far as death metal subjects go, but LIK’s personal touches and passionate belief in everything they do makes all the difference.

It’s a bloody and violent affair, and every part of it embodies that. Not only the music and lyrics, but the cover art and the guests. Which include Linnea Landstedt (Tyranex / Ice Age), Nick Holmes (Paradise Lost / Bloodbath), and Swedish actor Daniel Sjöberg, who does a staggeringly good spoken-word monologue in the track Rotten Inferno.

It’s this sort of creativity that makes Necro such a strong listen. Get those neck muscles warmed up, they’re well and truly needed here.

LIK – Necro Track Listing:

1. Deceased
2. War Praise
3. They
4. Worms Inside
5. Morgue Rat
6. Shred into Pieces
7. In Ruins
8. The Stockholm Massacre
9. Fields of Death
10. Rotten Inferno

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