Track By Tracks: Sterbhaus - Next Akin To Chaos (2025)

1. Deth Bü Wolfe:

A perfect Sterbhaus knuckle sandwich. It’s an up-tempo Thrash/Heavy Metal riff-based song with driving grooves, and its straight-to-the-point agenda made it a natural first single. It’s a song about the Disney Satanism within Metal culture and the irony surrounding that. About dressing up in Bathory and Venom T-shirts for the sole purpose of being part of the (underground) in-crowd and believing oneself elitist when one is just basically borrowing symbols that one doesn’t really know much about. Basically, trying to be deep and sincere while actually just playing a part. I saw quite a lot of this in the US when touring with Shining, and I see it in Stockholm as well.

2. Wrecking the World:

A mid-tempo Black-ish song that has a terrific flow and heaviness to it. It’s about Noah's Ark and, more specifically, the total idiocy surrounding that tale, and even more specifically, that there are people who believe in it. But the buck doesn’t stop there, because the main point of the song is that all those who don’t believe it happened but consider themselves Christian are just as sad, since then they start cherry picking by their own choice what is true and not. It wasn’t meant as a single at first, but when I got the vocals finished, I heard just how terrific it was and how fitting as a single.

3. The Evildoer of Pixelville:

It’s awesome to vary this much on an album! This is a fast shredding blast beat killer with a lot of tremolo melodies lined with terrific Thrash Metal and some truly epic solos and bass grooves. Basically half instrumental as the vocals are done by half of it. It’s about war infatuation in Metal culture, but also in our general entertainment industry. I seem to observe the topic of war being riddled by hardware fetish and people who think headshots are awesome. Metal has always had a close relation to war as a topic, but everyone was fiercely anti-war. So the point is that war is probably not that cool if you and your family are the ones being raped, slaughtered, and killed – even though you think Counter Strike is the shit.

4. Whippersnapper:

No moral high horses here, though! This is a fairly lighthearted lyric about a schizophrenic dude and his world perception. It’s a hook-laden Heavy Thrash (or is it?) driven song which is almost entirely penned by Jimmy when he was injured so badly that he couldn’t play guitar at all – so he basically wrote it in Guitar Pro some 12-13 years ago, and it was time to dust it off. Playful and just awesome riffs! The melodic Heavy Metal guitar sections are my personal favourites.

5. Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus have a Sword Fight:

An instrumental track, but it has some soundbites of people talking. This is, in effect, an intro created in the studio from stuff we had to remove from other songs – but that doesn’t make it less interesting. It starts off moody with some soft clean guitars and goes into this jazzy section with drums and fretless bass to then become quite heavy. It’s generally a mood builder to make “Master of the Hunt” kick off better.

6. Master of the Hunt:

A Heavy Metal / Death Metal track in mid tempo that’s pretty straightforward and with some truly epic sections and solos. Some seem to draw lines to Dissections' “Reinkaos” album, and I can see that to some extent – even though Sterbhaus is Sterbhaus, ofc. The song is inspired by the Netflix Documentary “Wild Wild Country” about a cult that relocates to Oregon in the US and essentially begins some sort of warfare around its surroundings (and within itself as well)

7. The Man who was a Rat, who was a Snake: 

One of our more progressive songs is totally drenched in hooks and arrangements. It starts rather mid-tempo, but then goes into a Thrash frenzy in the middle. It’s about an actual person, Jimmy, whom I worked for in a brief period. We’re not as mad at him as it sounds, though; it’s just hilarious to observe worthless individuals with too much to prove in an environment that means absolutely nothing. 8. Bad Workers are Slaves… And Dead!: A spoken outro for the song before and an intro of sorts to the next track. It’s me mimicking a psychopathic foreman mouse character from the PS3 video game “Alice: Madness Returns”. Humor and a bit of spookiness are what this one’s about.

9. The Autopsy of the Intergalactic John Doe:

A ridiculously fast and chaotic Thrasher with extreme machine gun ripping vocals. I actually had to pull back a little cause it was impossible to sing. It was the hardest song to get finished because the hooks are in the verse, and the topic and story (and humour!) of the song really needed to be in a very specific way. It was tough! And if I succeeded or not remains to be seen, but I think it’s a terrific complement to the otherwise rather epic tracks. It’s about the Star Trek phenomenon that if you have an unfamiliar face in an episode and go beaming down with an away team, you’re quite certainly going to die.

10. Abhorrence:

The huge reason for this album's existence. It’s an epic 17-minute song in four parts. If the band ends after this album, this is the most perfect ending one can think of, and if we don’,t then it’s a perfect way to end a chapter. It’s the best song we’ve ever done and starts off Heavy and epic, goes into a technical, Thrashy, and progressive long section, which is followed by a soft instrumental guitar interlude, and ends as epic as we’ve ever been. It’s a deeply personal song for me and a type of lyric I have never been able to write until this song. It’s revealing and naked about who I was, who I am, how I relate to the world and my surroundings, and how I am essentially both proud and ashamed of it. All this while clad in a rhetoric fitting its message.