Coroner: The Return of the Swiss Watchmakers

​Coroner are the Swiss watchmakers of metal, constructing mechanisms of impossible complexity that still keep perfect time. Their music is a device - polished copper, rotating plates, calculated chaos. And within that precision pulses something unmistakably human: frustration, wonder, and the strange dignity of perseverance. And now, after more than thirty years (!) they return with a new album, Dissonance Theory, on which they prove Coroner never truly disbanded. They simply withdrew into the folds of time, waiting for us to catch up. For the listener, it’s as if waiting for Godot in the realm of metal sometimes pays off.

When they play now, it’s as if an old machine - too beautiful, too complex for its time - has been reactivated. The gears turn, sparks fly, and from the iron throat of history emerges a sound both ancient and impossibly new. 

Coroner began as roadies for Celtic Frost, apprentices to a rugged alchemy. By the late ’80s and early ’90s, they had become masters of their own craft: architects of technical thrash metal so intricate it seemed to warp space-time (and would have a huge influence on bands like Meshuggah). Albums like No More Color and Mental Vortex were metallic maquettes, offering the listener a glimpse into a fractal infinity. Then came Grin (1993), an album that rounded their geometry into something more industrial, less infinite. And then - silence.

Until now.

On Dissonance Theory, you don’t hear the rusty groan of a relic coming back to life, but the controlled hum of cosmic machinery that has been running in secret all along. They say wisdom comes with age, and that wisdom tempers the untamable fire of youth. Coroner prove that the truly awakened mind does not mellow but mutates. Their youthful rage has not vanished; it has been distilled into something crystalline, deliberate, terrifyingly precise. Tommy Vetterli's guitar work gleams like a mathematician’s fever dream, each note an equation etched into the void. With Holdsworthian phrasing, he breaks open the dense riff clusters of "the Rush of thrash metal” in a YYZ-like fashion, lending the songs an otherworldly, almost divine allure - with Symmetry and Consequence, with its gorgeous spacious chorus, perhaps as the most striking examples. The atmosphere in a song is never merely an effect, but a fundamental part of the whole. On the album closer “Prolonging,” for instance, we hear a Hammond organ solo (not usual for the genre). Here, the keys do not serve as a casual extra layer to add some mood (as so many prog-influenced bands settle for), but as an essential element of the composition itself. 

Dissonance Theory is an album where everything works and hits hard. According to Vetterli, it’s the first Coroner record he’s completely satisfied with from start to finish. At forty minutes, it’s the perfect length, unfolding its ideas fully, compelling you to hit repeat the moment it ends.
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Coroner have not simply returned.
They have rebooted the future.

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- Wouter de Moor