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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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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