HKSPK are returning with a darker shade of black you haven’t even seen yet. The band from Brandenburg, Germany, have proven their mettle with Holy Scum in 2024 and worked towards Human Butcher, their EP, in 2025. This year it marks a return sharper, scarier and clotted with way more emotion for their upcoming album, Heimkehr. You might not be ready for this one, but the young band are.
This album was refreshing, for it wasn’t just standard black metal tropes the band relied on. This was relooking at their structure, approaching it from a whole other spectrum of emotional relief and expression. I’m not going to be revealing the greatest parts of their album here; it’s something you will hear very soon and be taken back with.
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The story behind the sound
1. Your new album means Homecoming. Does this connect to the subgenre you were playing before or also revisit the emotions and expressions that marked your debut initially?
Jim: “Heimkehr” definitely connects to where we came from musically, but emotionally it feels much more mature than our debut. With “Holy Scum”, we were still figuring out what HKSPK actually was. A lot of it was instinctive. We had riffs, ideas and stories and simply turned them into songs. With “Heimkehr”, the musical roots are still there, but our lives changed quite a lot in a relatively short period of time. School endings, starting jobs, studies, private situations – the seriousness of life slowly arrived.
Apparently, the first letter from the tax office changes a person (haha). That naturally affected the lyrics. The word “Heimkehr” itself sounds warm and positive, but our interpretation is much darker. The artwork shows a wounded figure returning home, still wrapped in bandages and writing on them. So the person has returned, but they are not the same anymore. That probably describes the emotional difference between our debut and this album quite well.
2. These songs jump between genres effortlessly. Which one out of these would you consider to be difficult to perform live?
Jim: Probably “Heimkehr”. Not necessarily because it is the most technically difficult song, but because it depends heavily on atmosphere and dynamics. With a short song like “Torture”, you basically have to enter at full speed and keep the energy there until it ends. “Heimkehr” is different. You have to build it slowly and make sure that the tension survives until the heavier parts finally arrive.
That can be more difficult live than simply playing fast. At the same time, we always consider whether something can realistically be performed by the three of us while we are writing. We have become much better at knowing what each person can do and what works on stage. Writing twelve guitar layers in the studio is great until you remember there are only two guitarists available (haha).
Their first song aggressively tears the fabric of your expectations and swings into play without holding back. It is not just a random barrage of notes that has been overproduced and lacks a certain clarity. HKSPK have put great effort and detail in making Heimkehr a deeper plunge into what their act means.
The track lineup and playing live
3. Fans can expect the intensity heard in the album to be replicated and built upon when played live. Would you open live shows with “Prelude”, “Torture”, or a whole other song?
Jim: “Prelude” into “Torture” would definitely work very well. That combination was designed almost like someone briefly opening the door and then immediately kicking you through it. The “Prelude” creates this short moment of atmosphere and expectation, and then “Torture” starts without giving you much time to prepare. Very polite of us.
But it always depends on the show. Sometimes another song simply works better as an opener because of the venue, the audience or the length of the set. We do not want the setlist to become something completely fixed. The songs have different functions live, and sometimes changing the order can make an older track feel completely different again.
As I went deeper into their album, I experienced riffs that not only saluted their inspirations but also developed impressive harmonies and upped their ante of composition, vocal delivery and how they can rile the crowd into the middle of the pit. You can expect a wild cocktail or hardcore, thrash, punk, death and black metal becoming a witch’s brew of epic proportions. There’s a reason they have named the album homecoming. From features that link to their previous releases to how they became the pride of Brandenburg, it’s all wrapped within.
The journey of making Heimkehr
4. Experimentation and challenging yourself seem to be HKSPK’s core mantra. Is there a mix or proportion you’re proud of, or do you like to organically see where the song will take you?
Jim: Definitely the second one. We never calculate how much Black Metal, Death Metal, Hardcore, Punk or Thrash a song is allowed to contain. If we did that, the maths would probably become more complicated than the songwriting (haha). Usually there is one idea first. A riff, a melody, a rhythm or sometimes just a certain atmosphere. Then we follow it.
If the song becomes slower, more melodic or suddenly develops a hardcore part, we do not stop it simply because that was not the original plan. Of course, we are proud that all these different influences still somehow sound like the same band. That is probably more important to us than any specific proportion. A song can be completely different from the one before it, but if the three of us hear it and say, “Yes, that is HKSPK,” then it belongs.
You’ve already heard two singles called Rot in Despair and Torture from the album. It’s a good litmus for the aggression and class they bring to this release. Not only are they remembering the roots, but they are also taking leaps and bounds to the kind of metal band they want to be. It is reminiscent of this generation, taking from the retro while delivering unapologetically characteristic art for people to listen to passionately.
Where art imitates life, and more
5. There are several personal moments that are performed in some way through these tracks. Is there a story you would like to tell the audience?
Jim: A lot of the songs preserve moments that probably would have disappeared from our memories otherwise. That became much more important on “Heimkehr”. “Rot In Despair” is one example where music became a real outlet for something personal.
The title track also grew out of an experience we originally would have described simply as a show we would rather forget. At the time, it was frustrating. Looking back, we would not want to miss that experience because it taught us something and eventually became part of a song.
That is one of the interesting things about writing lyrics. Something that seems completely insignificant, embarrassing or unpleasant at the time can suddenly become material years later. For us, some songs are almost like diary entries. Just with blast beats. And then there is “White Secretions II”, which proves that not every diary entry should necessarily be shown to your parents (haha).
6. Tell us about the recording process and passage of switching between English and German lyrics. Are there bands that have inspired you to do this, or is it your own outlook?
Jim: We recorded, mixed and mastered “Heimkehr” ourselves in Room13. That gives us a lot of freedom. We can try something, hate it the next day, change everything and then realise two days later that the first version was better.
The downside of complete freedom is that nobody stops you from discussing a guitar sound for far too long. But since “Holy Scum” and especially “The Human Butcher”, we have learned a lot about recording and production. With “Heimkehr”, we tried to improve the sound without polishing away everything that makes the performance feel human. The language works in a similar way. We do not decide beforehand that a certain amount of the album has to be German or English.
Some ideas simply feel better in German. German can sound very direct and sometimes much harsher because it is our native language. English can create a little more distance and sometimes fits the rhythm or atmosphere of a song better. Of course, there are bands that showed us how powerful both languages can be in extreme music, but there was never one specific band that made us decide to switch between them. The song decides. If the words fit the composition, we keep them. Everything else would feel unnecessarily complicated.
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Bringing the heat, the right way
With Heimkehr, HKSPK are on a roll to something powerful, layered and incredibly fluid. They haven’t restricted their train of thought in any of the music and have let the story decide where the music goes, and vice versa when it asks for it. Recording and producing everything by themselves has given a whole new dimension as to what is capable as a band. Presenting to you the very heavy and groovy Heimkehr:
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