At The Gates has finished its work on its upcoming album! The follow-up to “To Drink From The Night Itself” (2018) was recorded in part at Studio Gröndahl in Stockholm, Sweden, and was produced by producer Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios in Örebro, Sweden.
The vocalist of the Swedish melo-death masters, Tomas Lindberg, said to MessedUp Magazine, when asked about the band’s next album: “We were very excited about [2014’s] ‘At War With Reality’ already before it was released, because it represented our comeback. No one was as excited about it as us, but some time later, I thought it was too slick, too well-produced. ‘To Drink From the Night Itself’ was a response to that and we wanted it to be dirty and gritty and have loads of classic death metal sounds on it, like a lot of reverb on the vocals and that stuff. It was a record for old-school fans. The upcoming album is somewhere in between, something that continues on the concept we started on the two previous albums where we incorporated much more of our proggy, krauty and avant-gardist influences. Just to give you the picture of how it sounds; one song goes by the nickname ‘the Goblin song,’ another we call ‘the Neu song.’ But I promise you we don’t take it too far — people wouldn’t listen to it if we did. [Laughs] When we were in the studio, we told Jens Bogren [producer] to keep the gritty sound and the attack from the last record and put the overall sound in between the comeback records. And it sounds awesome. When we did the Roadburn festival two years ago we did a special set with guest vocalists and string instruments and that stuff on stage and played songs we never played live before. All that was very inspiring because we realized we can do it today, the things we thought we could do as teenagers when we wanted to be the King Crimson of death metal [laughs], but we weren’t good enough. After the Roadburn gig, we talked about incorporating more of those elements on record. Let’s say we’re super excited about how people will receive the record because there’s stuff on the album never heard on an At The Gates record before — a lot of weird things. [Laughs] For old fans, there’s at least five or six classic At The Gates songs on it, but it’s a quite diverse album. At The gates have been around for such a long time by now that we don’t need to release records to please someone else — we want to do things we like ourselves. It’s still death metal, but it has evolved. We just want it to sell enough to get money to record the next album [Laughs]”.
