Haerdsmaelta confront inherited decay on “City of the Dead”, the final single before the arrival of HAERDROCK

For more than a decade, HAERDSMAELTA have occupied a space entirely their own within Sweden's heavier underground. Blending hardcore violence, industrial noise, punk filth and pitch-black humor, the band have built a cult following through sheer unpredictability and an unwavering commitment to creative chaos.

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Swedish genre agitators HAERDSMAELTA release their new single City of the Dead on September 25 via Icons Creating Evil Art. The final single before the arrival of their forthcoming album HAERDROCK, it offers another uncompromising glimpse into a record shaped by political frustration, environmental anxiety and the absurd contradictions of modern life.

Blending the abrasive force of hardcore and metal with industrial repetition and post-punk tension, City of the Dead imagines a society built upon the remains of everything that came before it. Its streets still glow and its machinery keeps running, but beneath the surface lie buried generations of achievement, failure, knowledge and prejudice.

The song begins inside a city that exists partly as a physical place and partly as a state of mind: somewhere happiness has disappeared, compassion has been extinguished and artificial light continues to shine over a landscape devoid of life. Dead birds sing in the park while the city’s inhabitants continue building, even as its foundations threaten to collapse beneath them.

At its centre is the brutally effective refrain We built this city on rot and mold — a deliberate desecration of Starship’s “We Built This City (on Rock and Roll)” and another example of HAERDSMAELTA twisting familiar cultural phrases into something darker and more confrontational.

“The lyrics for this song are, as with several of our songs, a play on well-known phrases. This time, it is the title of Starship’s ‘We Built This City (on Rock and Roll)’ that has been desecrated,” the band explains.

But the image of rot and mould is not simply an accusation. The song considers how every present is constructed from the remains of the past, both good and bad. History is carried on our backs wherever we go: it can elevate us through accumulated knowledge and experience, or weigh us down through inherited injustice and prejudice.

“Wherever we stand and whatever we do, we are lifted or weighed down by our past. The cities we build today are built upon the rotting remains of yesterday—and that is also a fantastic thing. Within those remains lie generations of experience and knowledge that could potentially lift us higher. We just need to cherish that more and remember what we are and where we come from.”

City of the Dead also takes aim at the illusion of historical utopias: imagined golden ages that some continue to pursue but which never truly existed. Behind their nostalgic surfaces are often the same prejudice, decadence and exclusion that contributed to the present crisis. The past cannot be recreated, escaped or discarded; it must be understood.

The repeated command to “tear it down” therefore offers no simple liberation. As the song gives way to the darker instruction to “keep building”, destruction and reconstruction become part of the same endless cycle. Structures may fall, but the values that created them survive unless something is learned from their remains.

As HAERDSMAELTA put it:

“The problem is that we are such a spoiled, arrogant and ungrateful species. We need some serious scolding—and a good old slap across our collective face.”

City of the Dead follows the previously released singles Enjoy the Feast and The Kids Are Alt-Right, each revealing a different facet of HAERDROCK. Where Enjoy the Feast confronted excess, consumption and complicity, The Kids Are Alt-Right examined the fear that spreads through established power structures when the people beneath them begin to mobilise and answer back.
Together, the singles establish HAERDROCK as a furious examination of anti-intellectualism, extremism, consumerism, environmental destruction, guilt and anxiety. HAERDSMAELTA approach these subjects without separating political violence from everyday life: the album’s world is recognisable because its most grotesque features have already become normal.
Yet the band’s message never comes at the expense of impact. City of the Dead is confrontational, physical and built around repetition that becomes increasingly oppressive with every return. Its collision of punk urgency, metallic weight, post-punk bleakness and industrial momentum captures the central tension in HAERDSMAELTA’s music: the urge to dance, shout and move while everything appears to be falling apart.
With City of the Dead, the final pieces of HAERDROCK fall into place. The city is collapsing, the lights are still burning—and someone is already preparing to build it all again.
City of the Dead is released September 25, 2026, via Icons Creating Evil Art. The forthcoming album HAERDROCK follows October 23rd.