Swedish death-thrash quintet The Crown is so awesome that their music overcomes your personal preferences and tastes. They represent a hot bikini fox that even your gf ogles, a burger whose aroma mesmerizes your vegan pals, a party joint on which squares toke sociably. So, extreme metallers can laud the quintet as the elite of their genre, while everybody else can say, “I’m not way into that scene, but I love The Crown.” They’re a common denominator, an irresistible force. Though their stuff is out there, it gets in you. Everybody saw Star Wars. Everybody reads In Cold Blood. Everybody can love The Crown. This is my belief srs.

And there’s more Crown to love as of last week when they announced their second reunion with original vocalist Johan Lindstrand. This follows a hiatus-breaking entry in the Crown discography, the tight, monochromatic Doomsday King (with ex-God Macabre screamer Jonas Stålhammer). It’s an unusual Crown album, admits guitarist Marko Tervonen, and one made under “difficult” circumstances. Its reception was unusual too: Some fans perceived a thematic about-face by the devilish Crown and firmly decried Doomsday‘s Christian-ish tone. About this mild backlash, a friendly and laughy Tervonen spoke with MetalSucks last week between answering a billion questions about the brief Stålhammer era, his awesome strategy for The Crown’s next classic album (forecast for a late Spring release), the new opportunity to reunite with Lindstrand, their slight tour schedule, families, friends, confusable album titles, and the songwriting arsenal/ball-crunching power of the “properly” reunited Crown.

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In 2001, screamer Johan Lindstrand departed Swedish death-thrashers The Crown, and the band went on with then-former At The Gates screamer Tomas Lindberg. But after one awesome album, The Crown reverted to its line-up with Lindstrand for Possessed 13, one of metal’s twenty best albums. Then, after a re-make of that Lindberg album, The Crown folded and so I spent about a year crying while lifting weights. Just as I fully rebounded, The Crown reformed in 2009 but without Lindstrand (whose One Man Army & The Undead Quartet has a line-up odyssey of its own). With God Macabre screamer Jonas Stålhammar, they released Doomsday King, an album titularly similar to their first classic but really the only Crown album to be less rad than its predecessor.

But here comes the best case of déjà vu ever! After one album completed with a different dude, The Crown welcomes back Johan Lindstrand. Fucking yeahhhh! Lindstrand said in a Friday announcement (via The PRP): Click to read more…

In all the excitement of The Crown’s reactivation, I’ve only recently stopped to wonder about their forthcoming seventh album’s title, Doomsday King. That is, I’m pretty sure about its meaning (this, right?), but can’t quite see the wisdom of a title so similar to 2000′s Deathrace King. Why court buyer confusion? Of course, there may be a thematic link or insider connection between the two albums. But if so, such a salient marketing point would certainly pop up in the press release. Hmm, I’m not seeing anything, although guitarist Marko Tervonen told me in December that Doomsday King “sounds like the bastard son of Deathrace King and Possessed 13.” Huh. Does that explain it?

For now, one thing we can clear up now is another Crown catalogue question: Which is the superior version of The Crown’s fifth record? Is it Crowned In Terror (1999) featuring then ex-At The Gates screamer Tomas Lindberg or its 2004 remake, Crowned Unholy, with longtime Crown frontman Jonas Lindstrand on the mic? For the intense Crown fan, each is required listening; everybody else shouldn’t be caught without at least one of the collection of these fucking brilliant Crown songs. So which is for you? Read on:

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When picturing The Crown in my mind, I don’t see a hard-working death metal band quietly grinding out classic albums. Nah, it’s more like a sequence from The Wonder Years set to “You’re All I Need To Get By” where everything goes blurry except for five frowning Swedish dudes. Sometimes it’s closer to Beatlemania as the quintet presides over a rabid press corps at JFK. I also like to think that when eventually I am imprisoned by drug lords in the jungle, the guys in The Crown will grenade their way through the gates in a daring pre-dawn raid. One could say that they are the house band in the dive bar of my heart. Ahem. So you could see how the announcement of their reformation — plus singer Jonas Stålhammar and minus Johan Lindstrand (One Man Army & The Undead Quartet) — would cause me to do the journalist equivalent of lunging for their bra strap. I begged for an interview.

And so in a Metal Sucks Universe Exclusive after the jump, guitarist Marko Tervonen explains how most of the Crown became Dobermann, how Dobermann became The Crown, the making of their “stunning” seventh album, and of course, the past, present, and future of The Crown.

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