With 14 albums now under their belts, this berserker quartet has staked out territory all too familiar on their latest entry, which is aptly dubbed “No Sign Of Life.” Still drawing heavily from the rustic, thrash-based, and simplified songwriting approach that defined their sound from the beginning, with maybe some occasional echoes of their brief flirtation with a more hardcore/death ‘n’ roll sound in the later 90s, the resulting sound has all the makings of an overt throwback. Though later this coupling of Viking exploits and extreme metal would become more readily associated with the melodic death metal scene and a number of derivations of it, Unleashed themselves remained mostly tied to the more dissonant and brutal trappings of Sweden’s old school death prodigies, specifically that of early 90s Entombed and Dismember, the former being all but bassist and front man Johnny Hedlund’s former band through its association with Nihilist, and the passage of 30 years since their 1991 debut “Where No Life Dwells” hitting the shelves has seen little change. Though the concept of merging metal music with the subject of Norse history and mythology predates the advent of death metal, there is a fitting character of the two coming into contact with each other, and Stockholm-based pioneers Unleashed were among the earliest entries to explore the results. Every movement has a forerunner, an influential figure of sorts that isn’t necessarily part of what comes later, but provides the framework by which it comes to develop.