THIS WEEK I’M LISTENING TO...WOLVERINE – Anomalies (Music Theories Recordings)
“You can’t hurry love,” one-time Kerrang! cover star Phil Collins once crooned. Nor can you hurry WOLVERINE. I interviewed the band back in 2007 for ProgPower UK, and we talked about their third album, the relatively recently-released ‘Still’. Fast-forward to 2026, and they’re releasing their sixth album ‘Anomalies’. Time moves slowly in the Wolverine universe, and their last full album – the ‘A Darkened Sun’ EP aside – was 2016’s ‘Machine Viva’. “Life got in the way,” admits frontman Stefan Zell in the band’s latest bio. “We released ‘Still’ in [June] 2006, that’s going to be 20 years ago soon! Up until then, we were really focused on the band. With ‘Still’, we thought we had the album, but everything just went quiet. It just didn’t take off.” But all that should change with ‘Anomalies’: new album, new label, new start, as the Swedish progressive quintet have come up with yet another extremely classy release.
photo by Mattias Wigforss
Wolverine – with guitarist Jonas Jonsson, keyboard player Per Henriksson, bassist Thomas Jansson and drummer Marcus Losbjer lining up alongside Zell – come at the progressive metal genre from the slow-burning, more downbeat angle similar to countrymen Katatonia or latter-day Anathema. This isn’t multiple time-changes and flashy musicianship, this is a band who let the songs breathe and develop, sometimes with a minimal amount of support from the musicians themselves. The results, in songs like ‘Circuits’, the beautifully bleak ‘Automaton’ and the passionate ‘This World And All Its Dazzling Lights’ with its poignant guitar solo are soulful and frank, rooted in everyday issues yet almost transcending the commonplace. The musicianship ranges from the jaw-droopingly sublime to heart-racingly exhilarating, and, as ever with Wolverine, the lyrics are drawn from the real world. “It’s a cliché,” said Zell when I spoke to him all those years ago, “but we draw inspiration from life. We write based on things we have experienced. Dragons and wizards are not for us.”
Quoted in the bio, Zell says that “I think that, in a way, something that runs through the album is getting older, and that’s something we can all relate to.” And given that we are all getting older, let’s just hope that they can reduce the gap between album releases, or some of us might not be around to witness their next one!
Video clips:
‘Nightfall’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkshMaDDnx8
‘A Perfect Alignment’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0uBjMvVkdw&list=RDq0uBjMvVkdw&start_radio=1
John Tucker February 2026