Wolverine 'Anomalies' album review: After a decade-long silence, Wolverine return with an album steeped in reflection, soul-searching, and introspection.

After a decade-long silence, Wolverine return with Anomalies, an album steeped in reflection, soul-searching, and introspection.

It’s been ten years since the Söderhamn quintet last delivered a full-length record, but distance, time, and that old cliché — life experience — have clearly emboldened the band. Jonas Jonsson (guitar), Thomas Jansson (bass), Marcus Losbjer (drums), Per Henriksson (keyboards), and frontman Stefan Zell sound renewed, focused, and quietly defiant.

Looking back across a career that began with flirtations with death metal and evolved through the progressive explorations of Fervent Dream, Anomalies feels like a continuation rather than a reinvention. It documents a band — and a songwriter — still exploring identity and the sense of self, still curious about meaning and everything in between. What has changed is the passage of time: ageing brings clarity, but also raises even more questions.

The album’s first single, ‘A Perfect Alignment’, immediately sets the tone. Atmospheric and cinematic, with delicate melodies and a haunting vocal, it serves as the opening chapter in a trilogy that continues through ‘Circuits’ and culminates in album opener ‘A Sudden Demise’. Built around passages conceived decades ago for an abandoned concept album, the song feels both urgent and suspended in a dreamlike stasis.

That sense of retrospection runs deep throughout Anomalies. Zell’s lyrics repeatedly circle themes of ageing, lost direction, and the gnawing fear of unfulfilled potential. “Getting older” isn’t treated as a cliché, but as a lens through which meaning, purpose, and legacy are questioned. This existential reflection lends the album a deep vulnerability, yet even when Wolverine push against the inevitable with moments of crushing guitars and percussion, the record ultimately settles into acceptance.

One of the album’s most striking contrasts arrives with ‘Nightfall’, whose bright, almost uplifting melodies mask some of its bleakest lyrical moments. Zell’s account of crippling death anxiety — nights spent longing simply for morning to arrive — is harrowing, while the song’s propulsive energy creates an uneasy tension not found elsewhere on the album.

Elsewhere, ‘My Solitary Foe’ grapples with life’s cyclical struggles, capturing the exhausting repetition of lessons learned and paths retraced. Its melancholic tone and confessional intimacy feel almost intrusive, as if the listener has stumbled into a private reckoning.

In the end, Anomalies is an album about growth and evolution — about asking difficult questions and finding peace in the knowledge that not all of them will be answered, but choosing to live with the uncertainty regardless.