It’s hard to believe that Children of Bodom, that smooth-faced, Finnish wrecking crew, are on their tenth album. Still heavier than a bag of spanners and yet refined to the point that the melodies match the razor-sharp riffing, Children of Bodom arguably reached a peak with 2015’s I worship Chaos. It’s been four long years since I worship chaos and two years since word of a follow-up first surfaced back in 2017 (although, strangely, the album appears to have been ostensibly finished almost a year ago), but Hexed takes pretty much everything that’s great about Children of Bodom and, over the course of eleven songs, spits it out in what amounts to a stylistic best of. Still ferocious, the band have a knack for getting their songs under the listener’s skin and hexed is packed with such moments, the band clearly having a blast as they charge through the tracks.
Kicking off the album, this road is classic CoB, the riffing tight, the vocals gruff and the keyboards still defiantly high in the mix. Devastatingly tight, the band remain musically flawless and their delivery still has the ability to leave jaws scraping the floor. Keeping things moving along at hyper-speed, the juddering under grass and clover is a dynamic blast of death metal complete with harmonised lead breaks and nailed to the floor by Jaska Raatikainen’s ruthless beats. An early highlight, the electrifying glass houses is CoB at their brutal best, Alexi and Daniel breaking their riffs against the frantic keyboard work of Janne Wirman. One of those songs that you just know will ignite the moshpit, by the time the gang vocals kick in, the track’s already worked its way deep inside your cranium and it needs no further embellishment to stand tall as a perfect example of CoB’s searing musicianship. Next up comes Hecate’s nightmare, a nimble and unexpected departure that shows that CoB remain unafraid to learn new tricks. Slower and with a creeping, gothic sensibility, Hecate’s nightmare is another highlight, the band playing it dead straight despite the whimsical keyboard stabs that dominate the verse. The delightfully-titled kick in a spleen is as vitriolic as its name suggests, the band unleashing a frantic barrage of unhinged riffing and double-kick brutality, whilst platitudes and barren words has a chorus that will steal your soul even as the whirlwind guitar raises sparks around you. It marks the end of a remarkable first half that does not put a single foot wrong.
Opening the album’s second half, Hexed is near neo-classical in its delivery, the band tearing through white-knuckle changes with such feral urgency you’d be forgiven for thinking this their debut. It’s a breath-taking, sonically-stunning rollercoaster ride and it should come as no surprise that the band chose to name the album for it. After so stunning a track, Relapse (the nature of the crime), whilst fine, seems somewhat tame in comparison, although a deftly-delivered tempo change gets the neck snapping again soon enough. Another crushing track is up next in the form of the tense Say never look back, which veers from chunky riffing to keyboard-haunted verse and back again with malevolent glee. With the album flying past, the mid-tempo soon departed allows a moment for the listener to regroup their shattered senses before the album reaches its conclusion with knuckleduster, as potent a finale as you could wish for. With ranged guitars, acid-washed vocals and a chorus that seems to explode into a ball of oily-flame, knuckleduster is exactly the fearsome ending this album needed and it brings things to a cataclysmic head.
As with so many releases, Hexed comes packaged in a digipack complete with three bonus tracks. Two live tracks see the band on fine form, with I worship chaos’ title track sounding blisteringly precise and Morrigan similarly tight. With good quality sound, they’re fine tracks (although the purist in me prefers such things to be housed on separate discs), although it’s the rather odd remix of knuckleduster that is most worth having, the band repurposed to sound somewhat like Ministry.
Four years is a long time between albums, but it has not been time idly spent. The songs on Hexed rank among Children of Bodom’s best and the vitality of the performance reflects the confidence the band have in the material. A punishing ride that packs in all the riffs, melodies and meticulous musicianship that CoB fans have come to expect, Hexed is a frantic reassertion of the band’s myriad skills. 9
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