Though they’ve netted comparisons to everyone from Black Sabbath to Thin Lizzy, if there is an analog in the history of hard rock to the Swedish group Graveyard, it is probably Judas Priest. Both bands have roots in blues, both have a fondness for topping caramel-sweet melodies with gravel and tacks, and both know precisely how to ride the edge of bombast and camp without ever becoming the Darkness. On their fourth album, Graveyard root around even deeper in their record collections. In the kind of quote that becomes instantly regrettable, frontman Joakim Nilsson once said that he wanted the band to be a mix of Slayer and Howlin’ Wolf, but on Innocence & Decadence, they also find room for Motown, Dylan, and Queen. What makes the record work is the way they synthesize all of this into something that is swell-chested, triumphant, and surprisingly human, dosing each song with equal amounts of swagger and charm. In a genre that often prides itself on being forbidding, Innocence is a proudly welcoming metal record, throwing open its tattooed arms and carrying off even the darker material with a wink and a smile.
That all-in m.o. is evident from the outset. Opener "Magnetic Shunk" rides in on a deep-set, galloping blues groove, Nilsson’s eye on a woman at the far end of the bar. Instead of shaming or objectifying her for her sexual experience, Nilsson celebrates it—"It’s nobody’s business who you give your kiss"—before devising an almost comically ridiculous come-on: "No need to be gentle, baby, I like it raw/ Treat me like I was crime and you are the law." That kind of loopy wordplay turns up throughout Innocence; on "The Apple & the Tree", whose wandering guitar lead sounds like a distant cousin to "All Along the Watchtower", Nilsson opens singing, "I remember the days I don’t recall." Before the absurdity of the line can be fully absorbed, he’s skated clean into the song’s slow-winding chorus (the lyrics of which suggest the title’s apple might be the same one that turned up in Genesis Chapter 2). The hard-charging "Never Theirs to Sell" is a lean, mean-eyed, fist-pumping anthem of defiance, opening into a double-time, soul-clap break about halfway through that imagines Angus Young sitting in with the MGs.
Though the twin themes in the album’s title turn up in most of its songs, it’s the former that gets the most airtime. On the breathless, roller-coastering "From a Hole in the Wall", while low-end guitars pummel like rubber bullets, bassist Truls Morck sings, "Can you hear a big bird singing somewhere in the back of your mind?/ It’s loud enough to make you wonder/ ‘Can I please hear it one more time?’" Lines like this contribute to the album’s odd sense of sweetness—youth isn’t fetishized as a period of penalty-free rule-breaking, but considered wistfully, as a time of almost ceramic cleanness, before things like pain and disappointment became everyday occurrences. That same sentiment is given flesh, blood, and a broken heart in the straight-up soul ballad "Too Much Is Not Enough", which wouldn’t sound entirely out of place on an Amy Winehouse B-sides comp. Over a wood-fired blues lick, Nilsson mournfully watches a longtime lover walk out the door, before concluding, "I know you tried to keep us together/ But in the end, there was nothing left to keep." The gospel trio that parenthesize his verses provides the necessary dramatic flourish.
Innocence was recorded at Atlantis Grammofon Studios in Stockholm, which is the same place ABBA recorded their earliest material. While it’s not quite the same deep-dive into confectionary pop, Innocence shares both that group’s fondness for immediate melodies and their egalitarian spirit. Theirs is a club where you might get lucky, you might burn the night philosophizing, or you might reconnect with old friends. Best of all, it has a decidedly low barrier of entry: If you’ve ever nursed a drink while thinking misty-eyed about the good old days, you’re in.
