There are albums that introduce you to a band, and then there are albums that immediately make you stop what you’re doing and pay attention. For me, Sarcator’s Alkahest was absolutely the latter.
I first came across the Swedish band properly when that record landed in 2022. I didn’t really know anything about Sarcator at the time. The album came through amongst the usual mountain of music that hits the Crannk inbox, I pressed play, and that mix of blackened thrash, atmosphere, longer compositions and a willingness to push beyond the obvious boundaries completely grabbed me. I’ve followed what Sarcator have done ever since, through the outright aggression of 2025’s Swarming Angels & Flies and now into album number four, The Ones We Follow, arriving October 30 through Reigning Phoenix Music.
This time around, something feels different again. Not because Sarcator have suddenly decided to abandon what came before, but because they sound increasingly comfortable with the idea that what came before doesn’t have to dictate what comes next. Sitting down with vocalist and guitarist Mateo Tervonen, what became clear pretty quickly was that this isn’t really a story about Sarcator searching for another genre to belong to. It is more about a band becoming comfortable enough to simply sound like themselves.
You can watch our full conversation with Mateo alongside this feature, where we dig into the new album, the band’s evolution, the musical world surrounding The Ones We Follow and a few unexpected details buried inside the record.
Music Before Memory
I always like taking interviews back to that earliest musical core memory, that first point where music stops being background noise and becomes something you carry with you. For Mateo, finding one specific moment is almost impossible because music has been part of his life for as long as he can remember.
“As far as I can remember, as a human being, I’ve always known how to play guitar,” he tells me.
By nine years old Mateo was attending a separate music school for guitar lessons. It was there that a teacher put him together with drummer Jesper Rosén, beginning a musical relationship that would eventually become part of Sarcator. The early days were built around jamming Metallica covers, but things changed dramatically when the musicians around Mateo started pushing further into extreme metal.
Death, Obituary, Slayer and Dissection started entering the picture. Mateo had heard some of that music through his dad growing up, but he hadn’t yet buried himself inside it. Then came one particularly intense summer break when something clicked and he started consuming extreme and underground metal at a ridiculous rate, effectively giving himself a crash course through metal history.
By the time that summer was over, Mateo jokes that he knew as much about metal history as someone who had actually grown up through the 1990s. That hunger to discover music outside his immediate world would become incredibly important once Sarcator began stretching beyond the sound that first defined them.
Alkahest Broke The Walls Down
When I told Mateo that Alkahest was the record that pulled me into Sarcator, his response made me appreciate the album even more. For the musicians themselves, he considers it one of their most important records.
The self titled debut had established Sarcator as a vicious young blackened thrash band, but Mateo is refreshingly straightforward about what that record represents. They were teenagers completely immersed in that particular sound, so naturally that was the album they made. By the time Alkahest came around, they no longer wanted to ask what Sarcator was allowed to sound like. They wanted to find out what would happen if they stopped asking altogether.
Mateo describes the approach as breaking down the boundaries between what Sarcator was and what it wasn’t, allowing wildly different influences into the same room and trusting that the band itself would act as the filter. He gives a great example: you can draw inspiration from The Doors and …And Justice For All at the same time and still end up sounding like yourself because those influences have to pass through the musicians creating the music.
“We are the band, and what happens, happens.”
It’s probably the simplest explanation of their evolution. Sarcator wasn’t created as a project designed to fulfil the requirements of one particular subgenre. These were childhood friends playing together, bringing their individual tastes into the same rehearsal room and allowing the band to evolve with them. Mateo talks about the importance of having a band you can pour your heart and soul into without placing artificial limits around what it is allowed to become, and that freedom is exactly what I heard when Alkahest first landed.
From Alkahest To Pure Aggression
The beauty of Sarcator’s discography is that they haven’t simply continued adding more and more elements with every record. Sometimes the reaction to one album has been to rip everything back apart and head somewhere else entirely.
After Alkahest, with its extended structures, atmospheric sections and almost progressive tendencies, the band felt they had taken that particular approach as far as they wanted to at the time. Mateo says there are songs from that album he simply wouldn’t write today, but he doesn’t say that negatively. That is exactly why albums exist. They capture the musicians you were at that moment.
After emptying themselves into those longer and stranger compositions, Sarcator wanted physicality again. They wanted aggression, and the result was Swarming Angels & Flies. Where Alkahest stretched outward, Swarming Angels & Flies hit forward.
Mateo describes finishing that cycle feeling almost physically beaten up, both from making the record and playing those technically demanding songs live. Naturally, that created another reaction. Once again, Sarcator wanted something else, and that something became The Ones We Follow.
Songwriter First, Guitarist Second
One comment from Mateo probably gets closest to understanding the new record.
“I don’t define myself as a guitarist or a vocalist. I define myself as a songwriter.”
The guitar is his primary vehicle, but the song sits above the instrument. That mentality seems to run through The Ones We Follow. Rather than trying to make another technically punishing record or deliberately outdo the complexity of something they had already done, Sarcator stripped things back toward what Mateo calls the roots of the genre: high energy rock music.
The goal was to make a foundational rock record and then put Sarcator’s own edge through it. That doesn’t mean the extremity has disappeared either. If anything, Mateo thinks these songs could become even more intense live because the musicians are no longer tied down by some of the technical demands of Swarming Angels & Flies. There is more space to move, more space to perform and more freedom to throw themselves physically into the songs.
Death’s Rock Without Growing Old
Sarcator have used the phrase “death’s rock” around this album, and hearing that naturally took my mind toward the death ’n’ roll lineage of bands like Entombed and what LG Petrov later carried into Entombed A.D. There’s that same basic idea of keeping something genuinely extreme at the centre while letting dirty, catchy rock ’n’ roll swagger live around it.
Mateo understood the comparison immediately, but there is one misconception Sarcator desperately want to avoid. They don’t want The Ones We Follow interpreted as the classic heavy band storyline where everyone reaches a certain point and suddenly decides they’re too mature to make aggressive music.
He laughs at that whole idea. The energy hasn’t disappeared, they aren’t tired, and they haven’t decided extreme music is somehow beneath them now. They have simply made a different kind of album. Instead of technicality providing the intensity, the songs themselves are built to move, and Mateo expects that to become even more obvious once the new material hits the stage.
Fuck It, Make The Psychobilly Song The Title Track
Nothing demonstrates that attitude better than “The Ones We Follow.” It’s short, nasty, punky and almost over before you’ve had time to get comfortable, and its working title was “The Psychobilly Song.”
Sarcator could have taken the traditional route and made the title track the giant conceptual centrepiece of the album. Instead they did basically the opposite. The psychobilly punk track became the opener, then the title track, then the first single.
Mateo’s explanation was considerably simpler: “Fuck it.”
That playful attitude toward album structure is important. Every Sarcator record has approached its beginning and ending differently, and Mateo clearly enjoys messing with those expectations rather than following a formula simply because it worked previously.
Searching For Oblivion
Then comes “In Search Of Oblivion.” If the title track is a punch in the face, this one gives the record room to breathe.
Mateo has described it as the closest Sarcator have come to a power ballad, with influences reaching toward Danzig, The Sisters Of Mercy and The Cure alongside that enormous 1990s Metallica style groove. Years earlier, writing something this far removed from the debut might have felt almost illegal. Alkahest changed that.
By the time Sarcator reached this record, there was no longer a thrill in breaking the rules because those rules simply weren’t there anymore. “In Search Of Oblivion” was actually one of the earlier songs written for the album and arrived just as naturally as everything surrounding it.
That freedom feeds directly into how Mateo thinks about albums themselves. As a lifelong rock and metal fan, he is still deeply attached to the album format and what he calls its dramatic curve: the way one song changes how you hear the next, the rise and fall of the record and the feeling that ten tracks together should create something larger than ten individual tracks sitting separately on a streaming service.
More Than An Album On Spotify
That mindset becomes particularly important with The Ones We Follow because Mateo describes it as something close to a concept album. The music is tied together by this western and Americana inspired world, with recurring instrumentation and passages connecting songs that may otherwise travel into very different musical territory.
That common thread actually gave Sarcator more freedom to make each individual song stand apart because they knew the larger aesthetic would hold everything together. The concept also doesn’t stop with the music. It extends into the album artwork, vinyl layout, band photography and music videos.
As Mateo put it during our chat, the album isn’t just the songs. It is the entire thing around them as well, rather than simply becoming another release dropped onto Spotify and forgotten once the next playlist update rolls around.
The Buster Scruggs Connection
While researching the interview I found an older conversation with Mateo where he had been asked what film Sarcator could soundtrack. His answer was The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs.
Considering the gothic western world now wrapped around The Ones We Follow, I had to bring it up, and it turns out the connection goes far deeper than I expected.
Mateo and the band had been watching the Coen brothers film at their former guitarist’s place when a particular frame appeared onscreen. They paused it and immediately decided it was one of the coolest shots they had ever seen. Mateo laughingly tells me that they were going to “steal” it, before clarifying that what they actually did was create their own interpretation of that image for the visual direction of the new album cover.
Suddenly that old Buster Scruggs answer makes perfect sense. The western atmosphere wasn’t something invented afterward to sell the record. It was already living inside their creative world.
Harmonica, Improvisation And “Wanderlust”
Then we reach “Wanderlust.”
The album closer has one of those guitar introductions that immediately makes you pay attention, but it was another instrument that made me stop and grin when I first heard it: a harmonica. And somehow it works ridiculously well.
The idea started almost as one of those rehearsal room jokes where somebody says, “You know what would sound cool here?” Normally those ideas disappear by the time a band reaches the studio, but this one survived. Leo knew someone who could seriously play harmonica, they reached out, he recorded the part from his home studio and sent it over, and suddenly Sarcator had harmonica sitting inside the closing track of their new record.
For Mateo, that sense of surprise is exactly the point. He loves hearing a record and having that moment where you wonder if the band really just did what you think they did.
“Wanderlust” had one more surprise waiting as well because the ending wasn’t carefully mapped out. It was improvised.
Where Alkahest had finished with something huge and bombastic, and Swarming Angels & Flies had deliberately ended abruptly in the middle of the violence, this time Sarcator decided to just jam. Everything heard through the end of “Wanderlust” is the band improvising together on the first take, with no carefully planned resolution.
For an album built around serving the song rather than obeying expectations, it’s probably the most fitting ending they could have created.
Knowing When To Push Back
Toward the end of our conversation I eventually brought up Mateo’s dad, Marko Tervonen of The Crown. I interviewed Marko around a year ago, but I deliberately wanted to keep that connection away from the beginning of this conversation. Mateo has already built an incredible musical identity of his own, and Sarcator deserves to be talked about on those terms.
When it comes to recording, though, Marko has been part of Sarcator’s world from the beginning, and Mateo makes an important point: they don’t continue working together simply because it is convenient. They work together because it sounds good.
There is also the huge advantage of walking into the studio with someone who already understands exactly what the band wants. There is no introductory period spent explaining tastes, references and preferences because they can start working immediately.
That doesn’t mean everything is easy. Mateo describes Marko as incredibly hard headed when it comes to audio, and if you want to push an idea through, you need enough conviction to push back just as hard. That dynamic seems strangely appropriate for a record built around trusting instinct. Marko knows Sarcator, but Sarcator also know themselves.
Following The Song
After spending time with The Ones We Follow and then hearing Mateo talk about how Sarcator arrived here, the album makes even more sense.
This isn’t Sarcator leaving extreme metal behind, it isn’t the “mature rock record,” and it isn’t a band desperately reaching for another reinvention. It feels more like a group of musicians understanding that everything they have already done remains part of them without becoming a rulebook they have to keep following.
The blackened thrash of the debut still exists in the DNA, the freedom discovered through Alkahest is still there, and the aggression of Swarming Angels & Flies hasn’t disappeared. None of those records, though, gets to dictate what Sarcator has to be today.
Mateo describes himself as a songwriter who happens to use guitar as his main vehicle, and that might also be the simplest way to understand Sarcator in 2026. They are not following a genre. They are following whatever makes the song work, and on The Ones We Follow, that takes them through punk, extreme metal, gothic atmosphere, rock ’n’ roll swagger, western imagery and even a fucking harmonica without ever losing sight of who is making the music.
That is probably what impressed me most about the record. I came into Sarcator through Alkahest because I loved hearing a young band tearing down its own boundaries. Four years later, The Ones We Follow sounds like a band that no longer needs those boundaries in the first place.
The Ones We Follow** will be released on October 30, 2026 via Reigning Phoenix Music.**
**Pre-Save / Pre-Order the album HERE: **https://sarcator.rpm.link/followalbumPR
