Bandcamp The name started as a joke. HKSPK stood for HELLOKITTISCUMPORNKILLER until the band dropped the long version two years ago and kept only the initials, and the two records before this one were called Holy Scum and The Human Butcher. None of that prepares you for an album whose entire argument is that getting home from a war is the hard part.
Twenty five minutes, eight tracks, three people from Frankfurt an der Oder, no label. And in all of it there is not one moment of triumph. That sounds like a small thing until you notice how much war-adjacent metal is built around exactly the opposite: the last stand, the charge, the swelling finish that tells you the suffering bought something. Jim, Leon and Arne have written the version where it bought nothing.
They are explicit about it. On “Rain In The Face”, which borrows the name of the Lakota leader who fought at the Little Bighorn without pretending to be biography, the arc runs through wounding, capture and revenge to the recognition that none of it ended the larger fight. On the title track the band describe the subject as the moment after the noise stops, and the song obliges by finishing without a resolution, just an open chord and a decision not to comfort anybody. Even “Kill The Weak”, the one title that could be read badly, is framed by the band as a mantra of rage rather than a statement of intent, and the song carries it that way: a minute and a half of punk-speed self-loathing rather than anything ideological.
So the writing knows what it is doing. The recording is less sure.
These eight tracks do not sound like they come from one place. “Torture” is a raw, mid-heavy live take with an untriggered kit and cymbals that wash into each other when it gets busy. “Sonnenjäger” arrives loud, sample-assisted and compressed to a shine, and could be from a different band on a different budget. “Rot In Despair” has the best room on the record, a kit that sounds hit rather than assembled, and a bass that actually growls instead of just holding down the bottom. “Rain In The Face” sounds like a rehearsal space, narrow and thin, with a kick that never reaches the floor. On a longer album you might read that as range. Across twenty five minutes it reads as a compilation.
The two ends save it. “Prelude” opens on clean picking, lets a drone swell underneath and walks into the first riff with no vocals at all, and the title track closes with the widest and best-judged mix here, tremolo lines staying legible over a wall that would swallow them on any other track. Between those two poles the record is holding a shape it cannot quite hear itself.
What keeps it worth your time is that the shape is real. A German band writing about soldiers and homecoming has an obvious and ugly road available, and HKSPK have gone the other way with some care: no glory, no nation, no flags, just damage and the useless silence afterwards. Fifty physical copies exist. That is the whole run.
Come for the concept, and be ready for a record that changes its sonic footing several times in twenty five minutes.
Correction, 27.09.2026. This review originally closed by saying the album sounds like it was built in pieces, “because it was”. That was our inference and it was wrong. Asked about it directly, the band told us the production shifts are deliberate: the record moves from death metal to black metal across the running order, and the mixing and mastering were chosen per song to follow that. We still think the changes work against a twenty five minute album, but that is a disagreement about an artistic decision, not a recording that got away from anyone. Their full answer is in our interview with the band.
“Rot In Despair” carries the most honest recording here, an earthy mix with genuine air around the kit and a bass that keeps its own snarl underneath the guitars instead of disappearing into them. “Heimkehr” is the widest and most carefully staged, holding the gap between the quiet acoustic passages and the full weight without letting the limiter flatten the change. “Sonnenjäger” is the most processed, its snare losing shell depth to the compression and its cymbals crowding the top end. “Rain In The Face” is the rawest by a distance, a dry, narrow picture in which the guitars saw hard through the upper middle and the kick never finds any real low end.
Standout tracks: Heimkehr, Rot In Despair, Prelude
