Killing Kind’s second album, “Being Human,” doesn’t just get darker than their 2023 debut—it gets denser, more tactile, like the songs have finally found the weight to match their dread. Recording at Sunlight Studio with Tomas Skogsberg is the kind of cross-scene move that could read as gimmickry, but the payoff is subtler and stranger: not a metal makeover, but a thickened atmosphere where post-punk snap and synth-pop sheen are given a bruised underside. The band’s long-running love of melody remains intact; it’s just that the hooks now arrive through fog, headlights cutting a little too late.
“Humanity” opens with a grim, forward-leaning pulse, the groove tight enough to suggest a club track, but with an emotional temperature closer to a late-night emergency broadcast. Björn Norberg’s voice—raspy, controlled, and stubbornly human—acts as the record’s anchor, while Mats Wigerdal’s synths supply the haunted architecture: icy pads, nervous arpeggios, tones that feel less like decoration than weather. The album’s central tension is right there in the title: a desire to connect, and the suspicion that connection may be arriving after the damage is done.
The sci-fi and horror references don’t land as cosplay; they function as distance tools, a way to describe present-tense anxiety without collapsing into diary entries. “Desperately Holding On” is the clearest example—propulsive and immediate, a chorus that hits like a clenched jaw. Elsewhere, “The Wall” and “Go Away” lean into a more cinematic palette, with guest vocals and touches of viola and piano adding a chamber-goth shiver that’s closer to dread than romance. When “Dance” flashes by, it feels like a command rather than an invitation: move, because standing still is unbearable. And “Let the Demons Take the Win” turns resignation into something perversely galvanizing, a dark grin hiding in the low end.
For all its bleak imagery, “Being Human” isn’t nihilistic—it’s accusatory, then oddly tender, especially as “Never So Cold” and the closing “Distant World” widen the frame into something like resolve. The album’s most impressive trick is how it balances mass and clarity: you can feel the thump in your sternum, but the melodies still cut through. If Killing Kind started as a pandemic-born escape hatch, this is the sound of that project stepping onto a stage and realizing the spotlight suits it.
