There is a new @AtthegatesGBG record, "The Nightmare of Being". A new At The Gates album is always something to celebrate - they're legends for a reason. Recent albums have seen them getting more progressive, and more conceptual. This one dives into the philosophy of pessimism!
Pretty much peanut butter and jelly for the kind of death metal they're going to hit you in the face with. This record starts with some pretty "traditional" tracks - Spectre of Extinction, The Paradox, and Nightmare of Being.
They ease you in to the progressive bits - you start to hear more layered textures, more small sounds and queues in The Paradox. Choir sounds. Soft acoustic guitar.
The Nightmare of Being slows things down, but builds back up nicely. It's here the album really kicks into the stride its going to hold for the rest of the album - complex soundscapes that lurch into that classic at the gates fury.
That a band this beloved can swing this hard at the conceptual really shows why they're at the top of the game. They know what their audience really wants, and what we want is *interesting at the gates records*. This is a super interesting record.
Garden of Cyrus goes full in on the prog. This is where you get the least amount of "traditional" At the Gates. It's closer to Opeth or, by dint of the Sax, Rivers of Nihil. I love that this is an At The Gates song.
It's heavy without being pummeling. Someone is going to hate this song, but fuck those people. They have bad taste. After the descent down that is the first 3 tracks, this starts to settle in.
The rest of the album follows the thread - dealing with how to stay present in a world that is indifferent to your existence. It's dark, it's heavy, it rips, and it's beautifully stark.
If Slaughter of the Soul is an A+ (which, it is - all time classic), this is a solid A. It's interesting, its complex. It won't have as many tracks that stand out, but as an album, it works front to back. Worth listening to without distractions.
At the motherfucking gates, my friends. At the motherfucking gates.
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