At The Gates: Songs Of A Dead Dreamer

There’s few bands in the upper echelons of the extreme metal scene that can generate quite as much excitement as AT THE GATES. The Swedish melo-death pioneers have built a back-catalogue that is pretty much flawless, and a reputation for incredible quality over the years – especially since their 2014 reunion effort At War With Reality. After a gap of nearly two decades there was always going to be a buzz if and when AT THE GATES hit the studio once more, but the five-piece smashed all expectations. Then in 2018, they doubled down on their reunion glories and delivered arguably their strongest record to date with the incredible To Drink From The Night Itself. Now, a full seven years on from their spectacular return, AT THE GATES come back with The Nightmare Of Being, their seventh record and their third since reuniting.

Vocalist Tomas Lindberg has always been a bit more grand with his lyrical approach than many of his contemporaries. There’s few examples of all-out gore worship across AT THE GATES’ catalogue, rather the Swedes have been more of a thinking-man’s death metal band. Philosophy, literary genre explorations and journeys into the very essence of his own soul have all been ever-present in the band’s lyrics – and Lindberg has no desire to change his style, even if it has become more refined over the years.

“I think from the beginning I wanted to create something that meant more to me. I had already explored the more basic death metal lyrics with my previous band GROTESQUE. That was actually one of the reasons that the band broke up, we felt that what we wanted to portray with our music and our lyrics became larger than the concept of that band. Since the early days, I’ve always wanted to explore different paths and be more honest to who I am and the emotions that I want to portray.” Lindberg begins, discussing his early progression as a lyricist before going on to detail how his style of lyricism has developed. “The difference between the early days of AT THE GATES and now is, since the reunion, I made it a goal for myself to go deeper into what I write about – read about a subject and research it before writing on it, and to base my lyrics on different levels. That’s something I learned with At War With Reality, the layers used by writers in the magical realism literary genre – I developed both the technique and the depth of my lyrics. It’s still the same kind of subjects, just more evolved.”

Lindberg isn’t joking around when he talks about the depth of his lyrics in recent years. The Nightmare Of Being might just be his most adventurous lyrical challenge yet, a voyage exploring the dark side of philosophical views on existence. Pessimism is a term often thrown around without much thought for the philosophy behind it – and as he explains, once you dig a little below the surface it makes a perfect basis for death metal lyricism.

“I always have a few concepts in my head that I want to explore. I was working on one idea for the album, but Martin [Larsson, guitars] knew I was reading Thomas Ligotti’s horror novels and he asked if I’d read his book Conspiracy Against the Human Race, it’s more of an essay, non-fiction book about pessimist philosophy. I dove straight down the rabbit hole, all of a sudden I was reading Schopenhauer, Gottfried Benn, Bahnsen, all of these guys – I had a very narrow view of what pessimism was before reading this stuff and shit, it’s so interesting.” Lindberg muses, detailing the beginning of his journey into pessimist philosophy before explaining how his philosophical readings came to inspire his lyricism on The Nightmare of Being.

“Eugene Thacker, one of the main guys for me, said something along the lines of the horror genre being a philosophy in itself – where human comprehension ends, horror begins. Philosophy is always trying to solve the big questions but what if there is no answer? Reading all these ideas, it’s just full on death metal – I knew I had to use this. I was surprised that no one had gone this far into pessimist philosophy before because it’s perfect writing material. When you read philosophy like this as an amateur reader, you can take on certain ideas here and there. One that really stuck with me was this idea that we have these defense mechanisms in place to cope with the knowledge of our mortality and the fear that is built into the human consciousness: to be aware of these defense mechanisms, you can actually live your life fuller as a pessimist.”

“The main idea is basically that mankind’s consciousness is a curse – the fact we are self aware and the knowledge of our own mortality will cause us pain and suffering. Embracing that idea is the only sane way, a pessimist might say, instead of trying to hide from these facts or building religions or political ‘-isms’ to protect us from the knowledge that life is basically a lot of pain and suffering. If you see the world from a pessimist view, you can appreciate the small good things in life more – it’s actually a bit optimistic, in a way!”

It’s fitting that The Nightmare Of Being features some of Lindberg’s deepest philosophical explorations thus far. The inspiration driven by Thacker and Ligotti and countless other pessimist philosophers blends absolutely perfectly with the musical direction envisioned by bassist and lead songwriter Jonas Björler. AT THE GATES have never been simplistic, but The Nightmare Of Being takes things to a whole new level – Björler’s most expansive, progressive writing to date just fits perfectly with Lindberg’s existential poetry.

“I think it was that initial conversation with Jonas where I realised he wanted to go further, be more exploring and curious with the music and the song arrangement – I thought that would gel very well with the theme of the record I had in mind. I told him ‘go for it, go crazy with it.’ The only thing we had to keep in mind was everything still had to feel like an AT THE GATES song – we had to be on planet AT THE GATES. When we started writing all of these ideas started coming out of nowhere. It was a continuous effort with the music and the lyrics going back and forth – I would write something that would inspire Jonas to go further in one way, and then I would hear what he had come up with that would inspire my lyrics. We really fed off each other.”

The Nightmare Of Being really is adventurous in every sense of the word. Lindberg’s deep dive into pessimist philosophy is a masterwork of poetry that really is much more fun than it has any right to be, while his songwriting partnership with Björler has resulted in the most mind-bending work of AT THE GATES’ discography. A glorious display of death metal, bask in the splendour of The Nightmare Of Being – songs from the dead dreamers.

The Nightmare Of Being is out now via Century Media Records.

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