Review Summary: Welcome to Bonkers is Nekrogoblikon doing what they do best: playing brutally heavy, surprisingly smart metal while pretending it’s all just a dumb goblin joke.
Welcome to Bonkers is Nekrogoblikon fully comfortable (as always!) within their own insanity. After years of refining the balance between humor, heaviness, and technical proficiency, the band takes a step further in its evolutionary process and delivers an album that is heavy, technical, and surprisingly elaborate.
Musically, the album is as heavy as ever, but also more restrained in its pacing. The average speed drops slightly, making room for greater emphasis on rhythmic turns, tempo changes, and layers of arrangement that simply didn’t exist on the band’s earlier releases — especially when compared to Goblin Island.
Don’t believe me? If my ears aren’t deceiving me, a synthesizer dominates “Dragons.” “Killing Time (And Space)” opens with a banjo. “Thanks for Nothing, Moon” features a very prominent keyboard line that leads the song alongside the guitars. And “Goblins” flirts with power ballad territory at certain moments! Wow!
But the most noticeable evolution in the band’s sound — or perhaps just a shift in approach — lies in the vocals. Welcome to Bonkers is, by far, the Nekrogoblikon album with the most clean vocals to date by Nicky Calonne, and surprisingly, it works extremely well. Rather than softening the impact, the melodic vocals broaden the songs’ reach, creating effective contrasts with the harsher vocals and reinforcing choruses that stick without feeling forced. This isn’t a cheap commercial trick; it’s a band learning how to better use its own tools.
The production is solid, as always. Everything sits where it should and sounds well-defined, with the exception of the bass — nearly inaudible, as is often the case in extreme metal (something I always complain about it). It’s not a spectacular production (and frankly, that’s never been a defining trait of the band’s discography), but it’s honest, functional, and effective.
“Mold” opens the album in deceptive fashion: it starts restrained, almost sluggish, but quickly makes it clear that the focus here isn’t speed, but density. The groove is heavy, the structure more spacious, and the vocals already alternate naturally between aggression and melody, setting the stage for what follows. It’s one of my favorite tracks in the band’s entire discography and — astonishingly — features an almost epic chorus.
“The Many Faces of Dr. Hubert Malbec” expands on that idea. The song plays with shifts in mood and dynamics, feeling almost episodic, reinforcing the sense that the band is now more interested in building atmosphere than simply unleashing riffs. It’s technical without being showy — something Nekrogoblikon has clearly learned over time.
“Dressed as Goblins,” on the other hand, is Nekrogoblikon at their roots: fast, very fast, and the most aggressive track on the album. Judging by its streaming numbers on Spotify, it’s also one of the audience favorites — and it’s easy to see why.
“Dragons” reinforces the album’s more modern side. The use of synthesizers is obvious and dominant, adding texture and an almost cinematic layer to the sound. It’s a great example of how the band has expanded its musical vocabulary without abandoning heaviness.
In the end, Welcome to Bonkers doesn’t try to reinvent Nekrogoblikon, but rather to refine everything the band has built so far. It’s heavier, more modern, more complex, and more melodic at the same time.
An album that proves you can laugh, pull faces, sing about goblins — and still deliver extreme metal at a very high level.
Highlights:
• Mold
• The Many Faces of Dr. Hubert Malbec
• Darkness
• Goblins
