Tag: Gothenburg

Tomas Lindberg 1972 – 2025

On By bigbadburchIn News4 Comments

Today’s news is a tragic update to revelations we were privy to last month, when At The Gates announced they were preparing a new album and that singer Tomas Lindberg had a rare form of cancer. Sadly, that cancer has claimed Tomas’ life. Tomas was 52 years old.

Lindberg was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in October 1972. He would get started in music in the late 1980’s and joined up with the band Grotesque. A bit later Grotesque disbanded and Lindberg teamed up with several others to form At The Gates. From 1992 through 1995, At The Gates released four albums and became one of the beacons of melodic death metal, a movement largely centered on the Gothenburg area. Their fourth album Slaughter Of The Soul is hailed as one of the best albums of the 1990’s and was a massively influential album on heavy metal from the 2000’s, especially death metal and metalcore.

At The Gates unexpectedly broke up in 1996. After this, Lindberg spent the next decade-plus fronting a wide range of bands. He would join up with Disfear, The Crown, Nightrage, LockUp and many others. He also formed his own band The Great Deceiver, showcasing a unique blend of death metal and other styles. And he provided guest vocals to a dizzying array of bands all over the metal spectrum.

In 2008, At The Gates reunited for a series of tours. The band did not expand much upon the touring for several years, but then in 2014 they became a fully active band again and offered up At War With Reality, their first album in 19 years. At The Gates toured regularly and released two more albums in 2018 and 2021.

The information provided in Lindberg and At The Gates’ statement last month outlines the final few years of Lindberg’s life. In 2023 he was diagnosed with a rare form of throat and mouth cancer, which required major surgery. In early 2025 some remnants of the cancer were found, requiring very sensitive treatment that left Lindberg isolated. While we don’t have any further details regarding that, Lindberg died on or around September 16th.

Lindberg’s death has hit the metal community hard. At The Gates are revered as one of the of pioneering forces of the heavy metal that came about in the 2000’s and basically saved the genre from the extinction that almost occurred during the late 1990’s. Lindberg was well-respected among metal fans and artists, as evidenced by his miles-long list of guest contributions and the wave of tributes that have flowed in since the news of his death.

For me, At The Gates has long been one of my favorite bands. I was entirely taken with the concept of melodic death metal and have been on board for over 30 years since I first heard them. Slaughter Of The Soul is one of my favorite albums of all-time and the entire discography is one I go back to with frequency. It took me forever to see At The Gates live, which finally happened in 2018. Seeing them live essentially crossed off the final name on my “concert bucket list.”

Tomas Lindberg’s death will be felt as we go forward, especially given the news that At The Gates do have one final album with his vocals nearly ready for release. Condolences to Tomas’ family, friends, bandmates and fans worldwide.

Album Of The Week – November 14, 2022

On By bigbadburchIn Album of the Week3 Comments

This week’s pick is a watershed moment in extreme metal. The album is hailed as a cornerstone of its sound and it casts a massive influence on the direction of heavy metal for generations to come.

At The Gates – Slaughter Of The Soul

Released November 5, 1995 via Earache Records

My Favorite Tracks – Slaughter Of The Soul, Blinded By Fear, Under A Serpent Sun

By 1995, At The Gates were part of an emerging Swedish death metal scene also including In Flames and Dark Tranquillity. Their music would carry the term “Gothenburg Sound” in reference to their home city, but would widely come to be termed melodic death metal.

For At The Gates, fortunes had been rising after the release of their third album, 1994’s Terminal Spirit Disease. The stage was set for a release that would capture international attention and make the band top players in the death metal game. As it turns out, even that bar was too low to describe what happened.

The distinctions between melodic death metal and, uh, “normal” death metal lie in guitar and vocal delivery. Death metal was built on buzzsaw guitars and deep, guttural vocals; while melodic death employed riffs bearing influence from the traditional heavy metal of the 1980’s and a higher register of vocals, rendering the output more comprehensible.

Our album today comprises 11 tracks from the original version, with a very lean runtime of 33 minutes. I’ll handle that before tackling the legacy of the record, which could pretty well fill a book.

The album kicks off with Blinded By Fear, an intense thrasher reflecting on the concept of death being the only release from fear. The template for the record is set here, with fast riffs and vocals leading into a brief yet intense solo section. There isn’t a lot of deviation from this formula for the record’s course.

The title track arrives next. Slaughter Of The Soul has become the signature anthem for At The Gates, encapsulating perfectly the sound on display. The song both rolls smoothly and stomps over everything in its path. Cold comes next and features a guest guitar solo from Andy LaRocque of King Diamond and Death fame.

The assault continues with Under A Serpent Sun, tacking the tried and true metal theme of the end of the world. The album’s first half (roughly) is wrapped up with the instrumental Into The Dead World.

It is a nice, quiet break from the otherwise relentless proceedings.

Things pick straight back up with Suicide Nation. This song deftly straddles the line between thrash and death. World Of Lies emphasizes the low end a bit more, while Unto Others goes back to the higher register and also picks up the pace a fair bit. The album rounds out with Nausea and Need, two songs that lay on the throttle and bring the album home. Everything wraps up with another instrumental, The Flames Of The End, which would come to be a more fitting title than it would initially communicate.

Slaughter Of The Soul captured the attention of the metal underground and thrust At The Gates into the limelight. The band toured extensively behind the record, especially in the United States. The saturation of the market would lay the seeds for metal’s next big movements in the early 2000’s.

While the album would go on to be hailed as a genre-defining classic, much of At The Gates’ celebration of that legacy would not come until much later. In 1996, only a year after Slaughter… was released, ATG called it quits. The members would float through various projects until 2008, when they would reunite for a tour. It would be 19 years between albums as no new recorded music saw the light of day until 2014.

One could be forgiven for thinking that At The Gates did release albums in that time between – hundreds, in fact – the influence of Slaughter Of The Soul is stamped all over American heavy metal of the early millennium. Strains of melodic death metal would pop up all over the US and also abroad, and it wasn’t hard to hear the influence of At The Gates in the music. Both death metal and melodic metalcore would be top-selling fare during the 2000’s and lead the pack in terms of exposure and discussion.

Perhaps the true beauty of Slaughter Of The Soul is that its groundbreaking sound wasn’t really new or innovative, or even groundbreaking. At The Gates had already laid that foundation with three prior albums, along with their peers In Flames and Dark Tranquillity. Slaughter… is a beautifully executed record that is a high mark for melodic death metal but also doesn’t really do anything other than distill what already was into a finer form. There isn’t much in the way of innovation – rather, it’s just the sound turned up to 11.

Today Slaughter Of The Soul remains as a staple of the heavy metal diet, in fact At The Gates have been playing the entire record live in recent shows. The album’s legacy is secure and has honestly only grown as the music it inspired became the law of the land in heavy metal.