Sweden’s Deville are celebrating twenty years in the game in 2024, and doing so with this appropriately-monikered career retrospective, which is set for release next month.

What you get here for your money is a new track, a Nine Inch Nails cover, a couple of cuts from the band’s 2007 debut, nothing from follow up Hail the Black Sky, Lava from the band’s 2013 effort Hydra, single tracks from 2015’s Make It Belong To Us and last studio full-length Heavy Lies The Crown (2022), as well, gratifyingly, as three songs from this writer’s fave Deville album, 2018’s Pigs With Gods, including the title track and easily the best song in this collection, Gold Sealed Tomb.

Eight tracks from a twenty year career might not seem much of a haul, but less can sometimes be more and the paucity of offerings here might well spark you to go away and investigate the band’s individual albums in greater detail if you are new to the band but like what you hear on 20 Years. There’s not a great deal of variation in the tracks the band has offered up, save for the epic tectonics of closer Rise Above, which shows the band at their heaviest and most progressive. The last two minutes of the song are simply crushing, but for the most part the band operate in a more melodic, upwardly mobile manner that carries a lot of grunge sensibility but in a good way… As mentioned Gold Sealed Tomb is the best song here, a mid-tempo headbanging beast equipped with some nice Alice In Chains-styled harmonies, but in truth you could probably drop the needle anywhere on the record and find a lot to enjoy if stoner metal/rock gets your motor running.

As career summations go this ain’t bad, and as an introduction to neophytes it works quite well indeed.

20 Years releases on August 9th.