HKSPK return with a reassembled gauntlet of atmospheric death and black metal on their new album. We talked to them about how their approach has changed over the years, how they choose themes, composing music, and what a homecoming like this means. This is their latest album Heimkehr, with eight songs that not only showcase their versatility but also come from a personal place while also associating with historical motifs. It is range and rage, atmospheres and ambiances, all coming together in wonderful brutal harmony.
Prelude opens up this album with a gentle, almost dramatic background against which this entire painting will appear. It blends effortlessly into the first track, Torture, blended intentionally in key and tempo. Though this was released as a single earlier, it has a whole different feel when a chapter exists before it. It moves like the crema of black metal, the drums strafing through with blast beats and a riff that tattooes itself in your tissue. For the first 45 seconds you don’t even hear a vocal presence, and suddenly it chases you like a nightmare.
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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).
White Secretions II links to the first version of the track in their debut album Holy Scum . This is a deliberate link for long-time fans who have supported the band’s career from the beginning. It’ll also tie to the theme of homecoming that HKSPK wants to depict with this album. It’s a gutsy thrash-like riff that instantly grabs your attention and can switch to a hardcore tempo in a fleeting moment. Ready for some classic death metal to mosh to? You’re here with Sonnenjäger.
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.
With a riff heavier than the anchor that drops from gargantuan ships, this is believed to get the crowd riled up beyond measure. HKSPK are exploring sharp and certain chaos with their track compositions. The mix on this one is incredible. It captures the biting distortion from the guitars and the kind of tempo that will unite fans live and even those listening at home. From the literal translation in English being “sun chaser”, this song almost envelops the light away to synthesise a dark, doom-based atmosphere all around.
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.
Kill the Weak goes on to show a certain versatility that the trio has always signalled towards. It is an interstellar, audacious blend of hardcore punk and death metal, all coming at times when you least expect it. It is extremely lethal in how the instruments come in, very technical in parts, yet it is something that definitely matches the pulse of the narrative. The narrative is what becomes king in Rain in the Face, with surgically accurate references and personal insights shining through. In this Doom Inc. track you’re hooked on every word and moment.
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
The pendulum that oscillates between different tempos and styles is what shows the growth HKSPK have been driving towards. Heimkehr is by all accounts a journal through death and passing, the strong emotives behind the negatives that occur and a fable through their range. From their personal accounts of a disastrous tour story to how it sparsely links and disconnects to tell us about war and fate, revenge and anger is a weighted experience:
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Self professed metalhead, moderately well read. If the music has soul, it's whole to me. The fact that my bio could have ended on a rhyme and doesn't should tell you a lot about my personality.
