This Land Was Ours is a blistering, sorrowful, and unrelenting musical chronicle of the colonization of North America told from the perspective of those who lived here first. Across 14 powerful tracks, the album traces the violent collisions between Native American nations and a series of relentless foreign powers: Vikings, Spaniards, British, French, Russians, Americans, and settlers of every stripe who arrived bearing crosses, contracts, and gunpowder.

Blending the soaring grandeur of power metal with the ritualism of tribal rhythms, indigenous chants (in Lakota, Tsalagi, Shoshone, Aleut, and more), and traditional instruments like the Native American flute, powwow drums, and water drum, the album is both historical document and funeral hymn. Tierra Krieg weaves a progressive metal tapestry of wars and massacres, broken treaties, environmental devastation, and cultural resistance—naming names, dates, and places with the same fury as the thunderous riffs that accompany them.

Tracks like “Pilgrim Steps Ashore” and “Guns, Furs, and Treaties” depict the arrival of Europeans with uneasy wonder and mounting betrayal, while “And Yet the Ocian” captures the strange triumph and looming doom of Lewis & Clark’s journey. The spiritual devastation of “Invisible Enemy” (smallpox) and the raw brutality of “We Bring God and Gunpowder” hold nothing back. In “Zion, by the Sword”, the myth of peaceful settlement collapses under the reality of massacre. “Wounded Knee” is presented as a funeral dirge.

Yet the album does not end in silence. The closing track, “We Are Still Here”, is an anthem of cultural survival and rebirth—a final roar of pride and continuity from a people who refused to vanish.