A band walks into Abbey Road with ten songs and no finished album. That is the strange, almost reckless idea behind Walk the Earth, the eleventh studio record from the Swedish rock group Europe, released on 20 October 2017. The same band that once filled stadiums with a synth riff from 1986 now chose to make music almost on the spot, in London, with a producer known for raw country and soul. It was a deliberate step away from everything people expected them to be.
The man in the control room was Dave Cobb. Europe had booked the most famous studio in the world for about two weeks, and they arrived with ten songs, not a polished masterplan. Some ideas were years old, like Pictures, which singer Joey Tempest had carried in his head for a long time. He had half a verse memorised and finished the rest at his parents' house. The song was conceived as a sequel to The Final Countdown, the hit that had made the band famous four decades earlier.
That connection to the past is exactly what Walk the Earth plays with. Pictures tells the story of people who left Earth in 1986 and travelled to Venus. It is a strange, tender concept for a hard rock band, and it came with help from Aaron Raitiere, a Nashville songwriter and friend of Cobb. Meanwhile, GTO grew from a riff by guitarist John Norum. Norum and Cobb worked on that riff together in the studio, and Tempest wrote the lyrics with Cobb. The song is about cars, the love of the road and freedom, and its music nods to Deep Purple's Highway Star from 1972.
But the real turning point was not a single song. Tempest had originally planned a concept album. He even met a university professor to learn about the birth of democracy. Then the band made a decision: Europe is a rock group, and the songs would be created right there in the studio. That choice freed them. Political themes still found their way in, scattered across The Siege, Kingdom United, Wolves and Election Day. The Siege looks at the French Revolution and Napoleon's victories over aristocrats. Election Day observes simultaneous elections in the US and England. Chris Difford of Squeeze helped Tempest with lyrics for both Election Day and Kingdom United.
Kingdom United was actually the first song written for the album. Its demo was called Path of Democracy, and Tempest played only drums on it, which was unusual for him. During rehearsals the working title was ProgLizzy. Cobb suggested adding a Mellotron section after each verse, and Tempest went to Difford with the theme of Magna Carta. Guitarist Boo Hewerdine, a friend of Difford, also contributed to the lyrics. The song became a strange mix of history, democracy and classic rock muscle.
Other songs came from even stranger places. Turn to Dust began as a musical idea from keyboardist Mic Michaeli. The band had tried to finish it for every previous album, but it never worked until now. Michaeli also came up with the title. The finished track cuts off abruptly in the middle of its main riff, followed by a very short, untitled instrumental by Michaeli that sounds like a recording from the 1930s. It is a jarring, almost ghostly moment on a rock record. Haze, like GTO, is built on a John Norum riff, and it marks the first time Europe included a drum solo in a song. Cobb and Tempest wrote the lyrics for Haze at a piano in Abbey Road's Studio Three.
The album's artwork came from an unexpected place. Mike Sportes, an artist from the Los Angeles group Filth Mart, created the cover. Europe noticed him because Cobb brought a T-shirt with his design into the studio. The cover shows a figure walking into light, with a grid and a triangle. That triangle was not new to the band; they had used it before, including during The Final Countdown tour. It is a quiet link between their past and this record, a symbol that survived the shift in sound.
Walk the Earth arrived as a single on 1 September 2017, and the album reached number two in the Swedish chart. For a band that could have coasted on nostalgia, the record was a risk: unfinished ideas, a two-week session, a producer pushing them toward immediacy. The result sounds like a group rediscovering why they started playing together. Nine years later, Walk the Earth still stands as proof that Europe chose the studio over the safety net.