At The Gates: The Nightmare of Being 12"

At The Gates: The Nightmare of Being 12"


Tags: · 20s · death metal · hcpmf · melodic · sweden
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2021 finds undisputed masters of Swedish death metal At The Gates delivering what can only be described as the finest album of their career to date. A concept album that explores the dark revelations contained in pessimist philosophy, The Nightmare Of Being unveils a newly liberated and adventurous At The Gates, via some of the bravest and most mesmerizing material they have ever written.

As vocalist and co-founder Tomas Lindberg Redant explains, the new album's concept emerged from an intense period of reading and reflection: "I had just read something by Thomas Ligotti – he writes horror and there's a lot of Lovecraft-like, dark philosophy in there, the philosophy of pessimism. Then I found Ligotti had written another book called The Conspiracy Against The Human Race, which is more a biography of pessimist thought. I thought, ‘Wow, this is cool...' and when I started reading that, it was him defending his worldview and going into detail about other pessimistic writers that had come before and how they can sometimes be connected to the horror genre. He namedropped so many people in that book, that it became a starting point for finding all this other stuff, and then I knew where we wanted to go with this record."

Quite unlike anything At The Gates have released before, The Nightmare Of Being plumbs existential depths and conjures some profound questions for anyone bold enough to engage. Fittingly, it is also the most musically inventive and daring record the band have ever made, as Tomas' brutally poetic lyrics collide with a wild hybrid of classic ATG trademarks, lysergic prog rock detours and moments of jaw-dropping grandeur. Audibly driven by a wide-eyed lust for the new, The Nightmare Of Being is the result of a highly fertile creative period, wherein chief songwriter and bassist Jonas Björler enthusiastically embraced Tomas' lyrical and conceptual perversities, shrugging off the shackles of expectation in the process. Although there is still plenty of balls-out death metal to be enjoyed on the band's seventh full-length, there is also much evidence that At The Gates have evolved into a more imaginative and devastating beast than ever before.

Songs like the twisted prog assault of "Garden Of Cyrus" and the malevolent krautrock battery of "Cosmic Pessimism" – a collaboration with American author and pessimist philosopher Eugene Thacker – bulge with jaw-dropping moments of skewed invention, while still delivering the expected thump to the ribcage. Recorded in several different studios, The Nightmare Of Being sounds colossal but weirdly intimate and oppressive, in keeping with the album's unsettling conceptual core. With esteemed studio guru Jens Bogren overseeing the recording of Adrian Erlandsson's drums and legendary guitarist and producer Andy La Rocque manning the decks for guitars and bass, the album is very much a collaborative effort, with all the sonic richness and ingenuity that only the fizziest creative chemistry can achieve.

With stunning, evocative artwork from artist Eva Nahon (a recent Roadburn collaborator who contributed to the presentation of Tomas' festival curation in 2019), The Nightmare Of Being is an extraordinarily complete and cohesive piece of work from one of the truly great metal bands of the modern era. Authentically dark and disturbing and yet undeniably exhilarating from brooding start to epic finish, it's every bit the equal of At The Gates' early classics, while propelling the band ever further down that fascinating, left hand path that has served them so well.