At The Gates
- Story by J. Bennett
- Photo by Niklas Sundin
The long and sordid (and ongoing) history of At The Gates
In the beginning, there was Slaughter of the Soul.
No, wait, wait—that’s wrong. In the beginning, there was dirt and water and protozoa, followed quickly by Guy Fawkes Day, the Industrial Revolution and a death metal band from Gothenburg called Grotesque (but more on them later). In the END, there was Slaughter of the Soul. And in the end, it was only the end that mattered. Or at least it was only the end that was worshipped—by dudes in metal bands, by dudes in metalcore bands, by metal mags compiling their Top 20 Death Metal Albums of All-Time lists (#3 according to the editors of this fine publication; at least two spots higher according to your humble narrator). Which would put the beginning of the end right around November 14th, 1995, the day Earache Records released At the Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul.
Fuckin’ A, man—we remember it like it was just 13 years ago: The third proper full-length to bear the band’s ever-morphing logo (1994’s Terminal Spirit Disease consisted of six studio tracks and three live cuts), Slaughter of the Soul would become ATG’s last will and testament. For vocalist Tomas Lindberg, guitarists Anders Björler and Martin Larsson, bassist Jonas Björler and drummer Adrian Erlandsson—along with the extreme music underworld at large—it would become a masterpiece. As such, it was the second album inducted into Decibel’s hallowed Hall of Fame, right after Slayer’s Reign in Blood, a decision that was later echoed by Insision bassist Daniel Ekeroth in his recently published book, Swedish Death Metal. “Not since Slayer’s Reign in Blood has such a massive and unrelenting thrash attack been unleashed upon the world,” Ekeroth wrote, “Though the structures were basically thrash metal, the death metal sound and Tomas’ screams made it into something new and fresh… At the Gates’ riffs are brutal, simple and catchy at the same time, and everything is so tight that you almost lose your breath.”
In fact, it’s the only death metal album your humble narrator can listen to front-to-back with something resembling the same degree of enthusiasm between said front and said back. But shit, don’t take our word for it. Here’s what our limey brethren had to say back in the day—“the day” being late 1995: “Come hear the slaughter, come hear some quality death metal,” Metal Hammer beckoned, giving Slaughter a 4 out of 5 rating. Terrorizer agreed, doling out their own 4/5 score. “Brutality with class to match,” read the pull quote Earache used in an ad to promote ATG’s 1995 tour with Unleashed. “Wondrous stuff!”
Wondrous. You don’t see that word in metal reviews very often these days. There’re at least a couple of reasons for that, and once you get past personal adjective preferences, you’re left with a veritable army of professional headbangers who seemingly divide their time between paying lip service to ATG in interviews and repurposing the occasional ATG riff for use in their own bands. “At the Gates had a tremendous impact,” says Adam Dutkiewicz, guitarist for New England metalcore megastars Killswitch Engage. “If you think of all the bands and all the metal going on at that time, they were part of the new movement to introduce a little more metal into hardcore. They kind of pioneered that whole harmonic-minor metal thing, [those] kind of doomy, gloomy, yet very much in-key and well thought-out chord progressions and cool harmonies. Along with Tomas’ vocals, it was something that was really fresh at that time. It really affected the way I saw metal from there on out.”
Clearly, Dutkiewicz and Killswitch were not alone. In 2003, Darkest Hour—perhaps the first band to publicly jump on the ATG bandwagon—flew to Sweden to record Hidden Hands of a Sadist Nation with Slaughter producer Fredrik Nordström, scoring guest shots from Lindberg and Anders Björler in the process. Unabashed Carcass disciples the Black Dahlia Murder are also confirmed ATG devotees, not that anyone would need them to confirm it in print. The band’s 2005 full-length, Miasma, reeks of Carcass and ATG in equal (and equally awesome) measures; “Everything Went Black,” the unstoppable opening blitzkrieg from BDM’s 2007 album, Nocturnal, is pretty much the best ATG song that ATG never wrote.
“In one way, it’s hard for me to accuse someone of ripping us off,” Lindberg says diplomatically from his home outside of Gothenburg. “I mean, we were ripping off our favorite bands—everyone steals from everyone else. But I remember four or five years ago, I was reading this Sick of It All interview and they were talking about some of the support bands they had in Europe. [SOIA vocalist] Lou Koller said something like, ‘Yeah, there were a lot of At the Gates clones.’ And I was thinking, ‘Does he know who we are? How did that happen?’ That’s when I realized there was something happening, that it was bigger than I thought it was.”
THE RED IN THE SKY IS REDDER THAN WE REMEMBER IT
The origin of At the Gates dates back to Gothenburg, Sweden, circa the late 1980s. At the time, the Swedish death metal scene revolved almost exclusively around Stockholm, which had the makings of a future uprising in bands like Entombed, Carnage, Dismember and Unleashed. In Gothenburg, however, Grotesque were pretty much the only game in town. The band was led by vocalist Tomas Lindberg, a teenage death metal fanatic who also published one issue of a zine called Cascade in 1988. Grotesque’s guitarists were Kristian Wåhlin and Alf Svensson, both of whom would join Lindberg in Liers in Wait when Grotesque went tits up in 1990 after a pair of demos and an EP. To play bass and drums, Lindberg recruited 17-year-old twin brothers Anders and Jonas Björler, who had been playing their instruments for just six months and had started a band called Infestation. “Grotesque was pretty much the first death metal band in Gothenburg,” Anders tells Decibel. “Tomas was just one year older than us, but he was the driving force behind the scene. I remember when I met him, I got back to his house and his walls were filled with posters and flyers and 7-inches—just covered, you know? It was a pretty interesting world to step into.”
Wåhlin would soon depart, taking the name Liers in Wait with him while pursuing a career in graphic design under the pseudonym Necrolord. His artwork would eventually grace the covers of Dismember’s Massive Killing Capacity, Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse and the entire early Dissection catalogue. (He would resurface musically in ’95 with goth squad Diabolique and rejoin Lindberg in the Great Deceiver in ’99.) As such, Anders switched to guitar, Jonas switched to bass and Lindberg brought in Adrian Erlandsson, a drummer he had met at a Swedish metal festival called Bergslagsrocken, to take Jonas’ spot behind the kit. Lineup secured, the At the Gates legend had officially begun.
The band’s first show took place in February of 1991 at a tiny Gothenburg club called Valvet, the central hangout for the local metal crowd. “It was a very small, squat-style venue,” Anders recalls. “There were maybe 100 people the first time we played, but 150 would’ve been full capacity. It was pretty chaotic. We had never played live together and it pretty much showed, but the audience was very wild. My distortion pedal ended up in the audience somewhere. We had to stop the show and ask, ‘Has somebody seen my pedal?’ But no one said anything. Luckily, I had another one in the dressing room. Two weeks later, a friend of Tomas’ girlfriend called and said she had it. She thought it was a camera or something. When we had asked about the pedal at the show, she didn’t even realize she was holding it.”
Later that month, the band followed in the footsteps of Entombed and Dismember and recorded their debut EP, Gardens of Grief, at Stockholm’s Sunlight Studios. Lindberg later dedicated the lyrics of the song “At the Gates” to Mayhem vocalist Per “Dead” Ohlin, who killed himself in April of that year.
With their first release under the band’s collective belt, more gigs followed. “We started off as any kind of punk garage band, traveling 10 hours to a gig that didn’t pay us and things like that,” Jonas recalls. “We did that for three or four years and it was kinda hard. Every band goes through that stuff, I guess, but for us it seemed worse somehow.”
In mid-1991, At the Gates signed to England’s Peaceville Records and recorded The Red in the Sky Is Ours that November. Released in July of 1992, it’s a far cry from the vicious death metal monster that would rear its head in earnest on Terminal Spirit Disease three years later. Plus, it sounds like it was recorded in a toilet under a stack of wet mattresses, complete with paper-bag snare and guitars that reminded Kerrang! of “wet cucumbers.” “The songs were good, but everything was ruined by the atrocious production,” Lindberg says in Swedish Death Metal. “I can’t even listen to it anymore.”
Still, The Red in the Sky Is Ours does offer a glimpse of the band’s potential. “At the Gates was really kind of different from the other death metal bands, musically,” Jonas offers. “We had a lot of weird influences. I remember Alf listened to a lot of modern opera, like Philip Glass and really weird classical stuff. And you can hear it—his riffs are really original.”
Says Lindberg: “I totally appreciate it when people talk about Slaughter of the Soul—because they might have a point—but when people talk to me about The Red in the Sky Is Ours, I love it even more because it’s like, ‘How did you get into that album? What were you on?’”
In late ’92, At the Gates embarked upon their first European tour, an eight-night trek through Holland, Belgium and France with U.K. death/doom dealers My Dying Bride. “We were kind of expecting a big tour bus, but when we stepped outside the station in Brussels, we saw two vans—one for each band,” Anders recollects, “And they weren’t vans with seats—they were made for cargo. So we put mattresses on top of the backline. You could either lie down or sit against the loading door. We only had small distances to drive, but we were very uncomfortable.”
Then there was a minor traffic accident that ended up making the tour even more uncomfortable. “We actually crashed the two vans into each other,” Anders laughs. “It wasn’t that fast—it was on an on-ramp to the freeway—but after that we couldn’t use one of the vans. So we had to rent a car, the smallest kind you can imagine. You could fit two people in the back, but it was really a nightmare. So we had 12 people lying in the van like herring and then we had this car blasting death metal—it was like 150 decibels in the backseat. So you could choose between the herring box and getting your ears blown off.”
“We had a hotel for one night and the tour was eight nights,” Jonas adds. “We slept in the street. I remember we had these punk crew guys with really big mohawks. They’d be carrying Marshall stacks with like one hand. Weird guys. After that, we did small U.K. tours and scattered gigs in Sweden, but that was about it. The second European tour we did was in ’94 with Anathema and Cradle of Filth. That was the first tour we did in a night-liner, a real bus.”
Erlandsson, who would go on to join Cradle of Filth after ATG’s eventual demise, sums up the early days thusly: “No food, bad gear, no food and no food. We played some really scummy places.”
WITH FEAR I KISS THE BURNING DARKNESS AND HOPE IT DOESN'T SINGE MY LIPS
In early 1993, At the Gates recorded With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness, which includes backing vocals courtesy of Dismember’s Matti Kärki, a hidden Discharge cover (“The Nightmare Continues”) and a song called “Raped by the Light of Christ,” which was arguably the sweetest jam the band had written up to that point in their career. Like Gardens of Grief, the album was ostensibly co-produced by ATG and Tomas Skogsberg at Sunlight. “We worked with Tomas Skogsberg on that album, but he was never there,” Jonas reveals. “He had an intern that did all the work.”
It was around this time that future Earache label manager Dan Tobin, who was then working at U.K. distributor Vital, was first introduced to At the Gates. “I had been given a test pressing of With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness and was interested immediately,” he recalls. “I remembered the debut album being full of ideas but kinda thin on the production side, so With Fear was a big step up—a lot of melody, a lot of technicality, but still with some memorable and emotive hooks. I was big into the burgeoning Swedish sound coming out at the time, which mixed Maiden harmonies with death metal intensity. It was perfect for me as a fan of both death metal and traditional metal like Maiden, Priest and Thin Lizzy.”
After a few more months’ worth of sporadic and almost uniformly shitty gigs, Alf Svensson decided to split. “Alf got tired of all the punk kind of shit because back then there was really no organization, no nothing,” Jonas explains. “He was so much older than us—he was born in ’67—and he didn’t like sleeping in the streets, I guess.”
ATG quickly drafted Jonas’ pen pal Martin Larsson from House of Usher, a band they had shared the stage with back in ’91. “When Alf quit, they asked me if I wanted to audition and it was a no-brainer—they were my favorite band at the time.” Larsson tells Decibel. “I figured out a couple of their songs and took the train to Gothenburg along with Jon [Nödtveidt] from Dissection, who lived in my hometown then and rehearsed in Gothenburg. The rest you know, I guess. My only grief with joining At the Gates was that I would have wanted Alf in the band as well. I had great respect for his songwriting, and I still do. I keep hoping Alf will put out some more music, but sadly it doesn’t seem to interest him any longer.”
“That was really hard because Alf was one of the main songwriters,” Jonas recalls. “It was basically he and Anders who did the music. That was a really tough time for us.”
But they recovered quickly. Anders stepped up to the plate, and with help from Larsson and a young producer named Fredrik Nordström, Terminal Spirit Disease ushered in ATG Mach II with a vengeance. “Me and Tomas were already aiming for a more straightforward style when Alf left,” Anders explains, “and Martin’s style really helped us. He’s a much more technical player than Alf. I love Alf for his ability to compose and make nice melodies, but as a guitar player, Martin is way better. Of course, we all developed as musicians as well.”
Former Entombed/current Disfear guitarist Uffe Cederlund recalls seeing ATG twice at Club Kafé 44 in Stockholm shortly after Terminal came out: “The impression I got was that they were on fire,” he says. “They had their shit together. I saw them two times before that, but I was too drunk to bother or remember. Today, when I remember those two Kafé 44 shows, it’s so weird that they didn’t pack that tiny room. That was their element, though. They were not a big band and they did not care. They believed in what they were doing 100% percent and they knew that they were a great band. The few people at these shows loved them for that.”
UNDER THE SIGN OF THE BLACK MARK?
In early ’95, At the Gates embarked on what was supposed to be a six-week European tour with Séance, the Swedish band that would eventually become Witchery and featured future Haunted guitarist Patrik Jensen. But the tour ended abruptly in Norwich, England, after just two shows. “The tour manager claimed that he was robbed after the second show,” Anders explains. “That meant we didn’t have any money and couldn’t pay for the bus. The driver wanted to drop us off in Leeds. It was hectic, and we all learned a very valuable lesson to not trust anyone. That was an event that shook us up pretty bad, but it made us even stronger, I think.”
At that point, Peaceville had already exercised their final option with Terminal Spirit Disease. ATG were without a label, which essentially meant they had no one to bail them out. In act of desperation, they signed with Séance’s label, Black Mark Productions, in exchange for enough money to pay off the bus company and fly home. “If we didn’t pay the money back, we were supposed to be on Black Mark,” Jonas notes. “But we borrowed some money from my dad and paid it off. Then we got contacted by Earache, and that was really good. Black Mark wouldn’t have been a good record company for us.”
By this time, Dan Tobin had taken a job with Earache. When he heard ATG were free agents, he immediately started harassing label owner Digby Pearson. “I had never signed a band before, but of course went to Dig and started bothering him with all I had about how killer the band were,” Tobin remembers. “I cannot remember to this day why he went for it, other than he obviously enjoyed the band—I think I just banged on so much about it [that] he gave in.”
In May of ’95, At the Gates reteamed with Fredrik Nordström and entered Gothenburg’s Studio Fredman to record Slaughter of the Soul. “It was the most creative atmosphere I’ve ever felt,” Lindberg recalls. “That album was everything we lived and breathed for. You probably couldn’t talk to us about anything else in those months.” (For an excruciatingly detailed account of these sessions, refer to the March 2005 issue of Decibel.) Right after the album was released, the band then set forth on a series of tours that would keep them on the road for seven of the next nine months and seal their reputations in the hearts and minds of the underground faithful. First they upended mainland Europe with Unleashed in November and December, followed quickly by a U.K. tour with Dissection in January of 1996. Both Swedish bands then made their U.S. debuts opening for Morbid Angel in March. Then ATG hooked up with Napalm Death, touring Europe in April before hitting the States again in June and July. By the time they got back, ATG were exhausted, Anders split and the band went tits up.
“Musical disagreements were definitely a part of the split-up,” Lindberg says in Swedish Death Metal, “but that could easily have been solved if we hadn’t been so young and immature. All of us were too stubborn, and we were exhausted from endless touring. There was also a lot of pressure on Anders to come up with riffs to match those of Slaughter of the Soul. In the end, it was impossible to continue. You also have to understand that we never really got very popular during our existence. We toured under hard conditions, and the whole death metal scene was trapped in a downward spiral. It was only years after our split-up that people started to refer to our last album as a masterpiece.”
RETURN TO THE SLAUGHTER
Now that we’re a good 3,000 words into this thing, we should probably mention that At the Gates have officially reunited. On October 18th, 2007, the Slaughter-era lineup issued an official statement announcing summer 2008 appearances at various European festivals, including Wacken Open Air (Germany), Bloodstock (England) and the Sweden Rock Festival, among others. By the time this hits the stands, details for a two-week U.S. tour will have been announced. “We’ve been talking about it for a long time, but Anders didn’t want the rumor to be out a year ahead of time,” Lindberg admits. “So there was total silence, even though we had agreed it would happen sometime. When we made the announcement, I got goose bumps straight away. The only other time all five of us had been together in the same room since the band broke up was when I got married.”
Since the ATG split 12 years ago, the members have gone in numerous directions. Erlandsson and the Björler brothers teamed up with Patrik Jensen to form the Haunted before Erlandsson left in ’99 to join Cradle of Filth for the next seven years. Meanwhile, Lindberg’s distinctive howl turned up on so many records by so many different bands that he probably holds some kind of world record. In addition to his own post-ATG bands Skitsystem, the Great Deceiver and Disfear, he has also stood in as temporary lead vocalist for Lock Up, the Crown and Nightrage while lending one-shot cameos to Darkest Hour and Area 54. Larsson has remained the furthest under the radar, playing in a prog rock band called This Quiet Earth (“a little like ’70s King Crimson,” he says) and another band called Slatattack that he describes as “raw D-beat punk.”
In the end, it was Anders who made the call to get the band back together. “I woke up one day and thought, ‘Now or never. You’re getting older, and if we’re gonna pull this shit off like we did in those days, it’s gonna be now or very soon,’” he offers. “We’ve been talking about this for years, from maybe 2003 forward. But we had to plan it a year in advance because of the Haunted and Disfear and Adrian’s other projects.”
Lindberg says it wasn’t necessarily a specific incident that triggered the decision to reunite. “I think what it came down to is that we all respect each other so much as musicians and writers. I mean, I never really had a problem with the twins—it was probably more like the other way around,” he laughs. “I’ve been very lucky when it comes to guitar players and songwriters over the years, and Anders and Jonas are the top of the league, you know? So theoretically, I always wanted to play with them.”
Of course, the fact that ATG have become about a million times more popular since their demise didn’t hurt, either. “Obviously, the demand for a band is bigger if people keep mentioning the name in interviews,” Lindberg acknowledges. “Especially in the hardcore scene, I’m sure the name-dropping helped us. And in the back of our heads, there is probably the idea that we built something that we didn’t have the chance to enjoy.”
“It’s always weird when a band splits up,” Anders adds, “I think it’s part of humanity that people want something that they can’t have. When artists die or bands break up, it becomes a cult somehow.”
Mercifully, At the Gates have said they will not tarnish their legacy by recording a new album. This is a point Lindberg has been adamant about ever since we interviewed him for the November 2006 issue, when the ATG reunion was—officially speaking—purely theoretical. “That was the hardest thing for me to say in a way because it would be so awesome to write with those guys again,” the vocalist says today. “It would be such a killer album, but there are just too many expectations. I haven’t heard a single person say that a new album would ruin their impression of the band, but then again I’m not a frequent guest on Blabbermouth. And I think doing a new album would be sticking our neck out, so yeah, there’s not gonna be another album. For the negative people, I think that also helped them to accept the reunion, like, ‘OK, it won’t be like it was in ’95, but at least they’re not doing a new album.’”
Fact is, a new At the Gates album could never be as good as Slaughter of the Soul—even if it was. “That sums it up pretty well,” Lindberg agrees. “A band like Exodus—I haven’t really heard any of the material they’ve done since they got back together, but I’m pretty sure that what they’re doing right now is technically better than Bonded by Blood. But, you know, Bonded by Blood, man! So why bother? But in my heart, I’m thinking, ‘What a waste. What a great album it would be. We would rip.’”
“I think a new album would be fooling people,” Anders says. “We can’t produce a record that’s close to Slaughter of the Soul, and even if we could, no one would admit it. I think fans think they want it, but when they hear it, they won’t want it.”
Still, neither Anders nor Lindberg will rule out the possibility of ATG recording under a different name. “That way people could choose not to refer to it as an At the Gates album,” Lindberg says. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to throw the idea of me and Anders writing again out the window.”
The not-so-hidden subtext here is that the ATG reunion will have a definite end date.
“This is closure for the band,” Lindberg stresses, “We want it to end on a good note rather than a break-up. I think Jeff Walker said it really well in the last issue of Decibel when he was talking about the Carcass reunion: ‘We’re not gonna overstay our welcome.’ I totally agree on that one.”
If things go as planned, the first ATG rehearsals in 12 years will be underway when this article hits the stands. At the time we interviewed the members, set-list discussions were in progress. “There’s definitely a best-of situation going on,” Lindberg assures us. “There are certain songs that we have to play—we can’t get away with not playing them. That’s most of the set list right there. It’s just the stuff from the first two albums that we’re discussing right now. And that’s just an awesome discussion, because everyone in the band has their own favorites.”
Of course, no one would be bummed if they played Slaughter of the Soul in its entirety. “The option was mentioned,” Lindberg says. “We’re only doing 40-minute slots at the festivals, I think, but if we do 90-minute headlining sets in the States, why not play the whole album? There aren’t many songs to not play on it, I guess.”
Clearly, Lindberg is having fun considering the possibilities. “Everybody in the band has other projects where they’ve developed themselves as musicians, but At the Gates has always been about fun,” he enthuses. “We kind of feel like, ‘We could have had so much fun. Can we still do it, please?’”
