Tierra Krieg’s Wolves of Westphalia is a ferocious, historically grounded concept album about the Thirty Years’ War—told with a werewolf metaphor born from the conflict itself. An old German veteran opens the record by explaining how soldiers, starved, unpaid, and unshriven, “became wolves,” echoing a 17th-century broadsheet that depicted armies as beast-men. From there the album marches through the era’s flashpoints: the Defenestration of Prague, the Bohemian Revolt, White Mountain, the Massacre at Magdeburg, the rise and fall of Wallenstein, Gustavus Adolphus—the Swedish Lion—Nördlingen, the high-stakes chess of Richelieu, Saxony, and Condé in “The Balance of Blood,” and finally the twin treaties of Münster and Osnabrück in “Diplomacy Outlives War,” before closing on the human reckoning in “Echoes of the Wolf (Legacy).”

Musically, it’s a battlefield of contrasts: brutal death/power metal for the clashes; melodic gothic/doom for aftermath and mourning; and a living tapestry of period color—pipe organ, harpsichord, cornett, sackbut, dulcian, viola da gamba, hurdy-gurdy, nyckelharpa, and field drums—braided into twin-lead guitars, double-kick artillery, and massed choirs. Voices shift between sweeping narration and first-person confession (soldier, civilian, prince, cardinal), with rotating song openings (chorus/verse/instrumental) to keep momentum unpredictable. Expect poly-harmony refrains, battlefield hymns, and even an Alpine yodel cameo celebrating Swiss recognition at Westphalia. Across it all, the wolf returns—not a creature of fur and moon, but a mirror of men at war—asking the album’s final question: Was it worth it, and what did those who fought truly gain?