Looks like the guys in Soilwork have finally dug themselves out of their hole.

Opener “Late for the Kill, Early for the Slaughter” is the fastest, most relentless thing they’ve done in a long time, and from that very first blastbeat, it’s clear that Soilwork wants you to forget about Sworn to a Great Divide. They want you to forget that Peter Wichers ever left the band, or that Ola Frenning pushed them towards a more mainstream-friendly and simplified sound. They want you to forget that they tried to be an American metalcore band for awhile. But most of all, they want you to remember that they’re still Swedish, which means that they can still put out some really entertaining and explosive melodic death metal.

And with the second track, “Two Lives Worth of Reckoning,” you’ll fucking remember, all right, because this is easily the best song Soilwork has written in years. Pummeling, syncopated awesomeness, gorgeous soloing and a massive, hooky and unabashedly poppy chorus that’ll get stuck in your head so deep, you’ll need a crowbar to pry it out. To be clear, this isn’t a return to the sleek, ripping sound of Steelbath Suicide or The Chainheart Machine – those of you that didn’t like the full-on embrace of clean-sung choruses on Natural Born Chaos or Figure Number Five won’t enjoy this either, but for the rest of us, crank the volume all the way up and enjoy.

The rest of the album continues in similar energetic fashion, from the ballsy, bluesy swagger of “The Thrill” to the lurching groove of “Night Comes Clean,” to the punchy attack of “Enter Dog of Pavlov.” “Let This River Flow” is another standout track that opens with a beautiful lilting melody and builds to another soaring chorus. There’s even an unexpected-but-successful experiment, a la Figure Number Five‘s “Departure Plan,” with the Alice in Chains-inspired “Epitome.”

Overall, the verses on every track are thick and groovy, but “Reckoning” aside, the choruses just aren’t as appealing as past highlights like “Rejection Role,” “Distortion Sleep” or “Follow the Hollow”. This is particularly problematic on tracks like “Late for the Kill” or “King of the Threshold,” which employ screamed choruses that make a nod to the earlier, no-clean-vox albums. I find these choruses much less successful here, though – Strid sounds unnaturally strained on “Late for the Kill,” and “Threshold” tries this odd, semi-melodic screaming thing that probably should have just been another big clean-sung melody.

I’ve been a Soilwork fan for a long time (hell, I even put the track “Natural Born Chaos” on the soundtrack of my third videogame project, Splashdown: Rides Gone Wild, for the PS2), and so it’s great to hear the band back in form after the last two unexciting albums. If I had to slot this in somewhere, I think I’d still rank A Predator’s Portait and Figure Number Five higher, and put this on par with Natural Born Chaos. Maybe if the entire album was as infectious as “Two Lives Worth of Reckoning,” I might have soiled myself a bit more. But still, many bands would be lucky to follow up a mediocre release with such an energetic return, and so that makes The Panic Broadcast worth tuning into for longtime fans and newcomers alike.

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