The cover art for The Sword’s second album, Gods of the Earth, depicts a dark, lightning-streaked sky and a flat stretch of scorched land surrounded by jagged mountain peaks. On the ground are the broken columns of a past colossus and in the middle, a skeleton hand clutching the handle of a long sword appears to be bursting from the earth. It’s a classic image, the kind of old-school J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons-influenced picture that graced metal LPs of old. And that’s exactly the point.
The Sword don’t care for ProTools, samplers or metalcore song structures. They’d rather dwell in the past — not necessarily in the hallowed era of the original Black Sabbath — but in the same zone as groups that were inspired by that original doom metal sound, including Trouble, St. Vitus, Pentagram, Cathedral and High on Fire.
At the same time, frontman J.D. Cronise says The Sword aren’t stuck in the past like a traveler with a broken time machine. Instead, he claims, they use fantasy and mythology as metaphors to address the unstable modern world of corruption and lies in a creative, escapist way.
During our Podcast interview, Cronise talked about the creation of the band’s new album, the meaning of songs like “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” and “Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians,” the metal scene in Austin, Texas and the birth and ascendancy of the band most likely to reclaim the power, glory, magic and majesty of Middle Earth (click “more” for a link to the revealing podcast).
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