A bit of a quick one today to pay futher tribute to Tomas Lindberg. Today’s song is a cut from At The Gates’ debut album The Red In The Sky Is Ours, released in 1992.

Windows is the album’s fifth song. Nothing was released as a single, this was the band’s very early days and everyone was running on shoestring budgets. Band members have retroactively lamented the album’s production due to those financial constraints and having a producer that was not familiar with heavy metal. While I do agree that production here does leave something to be desired, it’s an album I can still get through and enjoy. Many of the underground metal albums of the early 90’s did not have the best in sonic technology.

The music of Windows was composed by guitarist Anders Björler. The lyrics were penned by vocalist Tomas Lindberg and are, at their simplest, about someone going insane. There is possibly more to it, as the song might be a eulogy for Per Yngve Ohlin, aka Dead, the singer of black metal band Mayhem until his suicide in 1991. Dead’s suicide brought a ton of attention to Mayhem and many were on hand for the wild and infamous ride that the second wave of black metal would go on during the early 1990’s.

I do not know if Lindberg was singing about Dead here, the lyrics do indicate it could be so, but I can’t readily find any actual sources corroborating this. It has been a widespread rumor for years and perhaps there’s some long lost interview with Lindberg that confirms this theory. But for the purposes of this brief post I’ll have to leave it as a loose thread.

Windows is a very heavy, crushing track that fits its disturbing subject matter. The song became an early favorite of fans and endured as one of the band’s signature tracks, even after the career and genre-defining Slaughter Of The Soul was released in 1995. Windows does have placements on a few live sets both audio and video, and is also a live bonus track on the band’s 1994 album Terminal Spirit Disease.

While we wait rather sadly for the final At The Gates album to feature Tomas Lindberg, it is nice to go back to the beginning and hear At The Gates crushing it right out of the, uh, gate. From very humble beginnings, At The Gates shaped the blueprint for metal that would come for decades afterward.