Deep Cuts #15: At The Gates – 'Slaughter of the Soul'
Revisiting a melodic death metal classic and the precise aggression of the “Gothenburg Sound.”
Artist: At The Gates
Title: Slaughter of the Soul
Release: November 14th, 1995
Label: Earache Records
Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify
What does it mean to say that an album is a ‘classic’?
In tracking the evolution of musical subgenres, classic albums typically fall into two categories: simplification through stellar execution or subversion through unexpected experimentation. (Look, I know this sounds like another exercise in semantic pedantry, but stick with me here. I promise I’m going somewhere.)
Restricting our focus to the metal genre alone, numerous examples of critically acclaimed ‘classics’ present themselves: Metallica’s Master of Puppets and Slayer’s Reign in Blood for thrash; Death’s Scream Bloody Gore and Morbid Angel’s Altars of Madness for death metal; Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power and Sepultura’s Chaos A.D. for groove metal; etc.
However, in the case of melodic death metal, I think it’s difficult to overstate the impact of 1995’s Slaughter of the Soul, the fourth album from Swedish outfit At The Gates, as a true, bonafide classic. Let me tell you why.
I first heard Slaughter of the Soul over a decade after its initial release and the band’s subsequent break-up.
I had a job in a metal dive bar in my post-high school haze of purposelessness, caught in that awkward transitional period between late teenage adolescence and young adulthood's burgeoning, aimless freedom. I was working as a ‘glassy’ in said dive bar (i.e. not quite a bartender but an all-around shitkicker), which doubled as a live music venue, and I became good friends with an older colleague named ‘Hoops’ who worked as the bar’s DJ.
Hoops was a biology lab technician by trade who had recently moved to Brisbane from Melbourne for unspecified reasons. He was friendly and sage in the way that most people in their 30s appear to be when you’re still seventeen. While Hoops was typically high during most if not all of our shifts, the only thing he loved more than weed was metal, and he took it upon himself to educate me on various records during our early morning drive home from work.
In September of 2006, Gothenburg's Dark Tranquillity played a nearly sold-out show at the bar as part of their Character (2005) album cycle. Before their set, I hadn’t heard the band, and my knowledge of European melodic death metal was extremely limited. However, the show was sick, and I was now very intrigued.
Expressing this fact to an incredulous Hoops on our drive home later that morning, he promptly flipped through his CD wallet—steering with one hand while also eating a bacon and egg McMuffin—before chucking a non-descript burnt CD in the car stereo. With glassy eyes and a smirk, he simply said, “Check this out,” and then hit play.
Slaughter of the Soul begins unassumingly—a wash of static noise, some atmospheric ambience, and the crashing of mechanistic clanging.
Over this distorted preamble, we hear vocalist and frontman Tomas ‘Tompa’ Lindberg’s soft-spoken words act as a thematic proclamation:
“We are blind to the world within us/ Waiting to be born.”
Then, the riffs hit, and album opener “Blinded By Fear” begins in earnest.
The track’s now-iconic lead riff, played with quicksilver dexterity by guitarist and principal songwriter Anders Björler, alongside the furious tempo shifts and rhythmic lock-step of drummer Adrian Erlandsson and bassist Jonas Björler (Anders’ twin brother), have made the spell-binding composition an iconic example of melodic death metal’s relentless pursuit of precise aggression.
Around the one minute mark, Lindberg’s harsh mid-range scream pierces through the crushing mix, mirroring the track’s eerie malevolence with poetic force and hellish visions:
“I cast aside my chains/
Fall from reality/
Purgatory unleashed/
Now burn the face of the earth.
Purgatory unleashed/
Now burn the face of the earth.”
Moving into an unsettling bridge at the two-minute mark, as Björler and rhythm guitarist Martin Larsson juxtapose ambient notes against Erlandsson's pummeling double-kick, the track launches into a blazing harmonised solo off the back of Lindberg’s demonic chorus shriek:
“The face of all your fears!”
As far as introductions go, it’s hard to top “Blinded By Fear.” The track is all killer with zero filler, packed full of engaging performances and punchy songwriting that announces the band, the album, and the subgenre with crystal-clear clarity.
But where to go from here? Delivering on this promise of precise aggression, the album’s title track begins with a buzzsaw riff progression and a five-count smackdown as a lead-in before Lindberg gives the final “Go!”-ahead like a dread-locked conductor.
Once again utilising relentless tempos, the track’s effortless sense of momentum is anchored by Larsson’s punishing downstrokes, with Björler finding space at the end of each riff progression for little harmonic licks and melodic touches. It’s enough to be catchy and instantly recognisable without sacrificing the band’s concerted sense of heaviness or compositional intricacy.
Much of Slaughter of the Soul operates within this zone: simplifying and strengthening the remit of melodic death metal through stellar execution and exceptional songwriting. As J. Bennett notes in a tenth-anniversary review of the record for Decibel:
“Unbeknownst to the band’s members—not to mention heshers, headbangers and moustache warriors worldwide—it would become the most influential death metal album of the next decade…
Vocalist Tomas Lindberg’s immortal command—“Go!”—in the opening seconds of Slaughter’s title track had become the war cry for a generation of future hardcore heroes and metal mercenaries.”
Recorded at the hallowed Studio Fredman and overseen by co-producer Fredrik Nordström (Dream Evil, Dimmu Borgir, Opeth), Slaughter of the Soul is considered one of the defining releases of melodic death metal, alongside The Jester Race (1996) by In Flames and The Gallery (1995) by Dark Tranquillity.
Given the convergence of all three acts in Sweden’s 90s death metal scene and Nordström’s role as engineer and producer for all three records, this combination of principal actors is now considered an essential attribute of the famed “Gothenburg Sound.”
For At The Gates, the album cohered at just the right time. The band had already released several albums and EPs (including 1992’s The Red in the Sky Is Ours and 1994’s Terminal Spirit Disease), and their recent signing with Earache Records allowed them to benefit from a label with real financial support and backing. As Lindberg told Revolver:
“When Earache came along, it was like being saved! They already had a good reputation for signing classic death metal [Napalm Death, Carcass, and Morbid Angel, among others], so we felt right at home.”
The quintet now had a lot to prove with their increased profile, and this heightened visibility is felt directly in the album’s breakneck performances.
Following the departure of guitarist Alf Svensson after 1993's With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness, Björler’s songwriting efforts primarily focused on streamlining the band’s already potent sound, refining riffs to their barest elements and ensuring the production emphasised both the clarity and precision of their formidable rhythmic tumults.
As Nordström recalls in a 25th-anniversary piece for Blunt, the band were all too eager to push themselves to the limit—sometimes even to a fault:
“I remember Jonas, one of the brothers, he was pushing his brother so hard. He was sitting there complaining, more or less, at him for the whole guitar tracking. So when it was time to bass, he was exhausted. He didn’t have any energy left for doing bass. So the bass is kind of sloppily played on that album. That’s why you don’t hear the bass, except for one part. You never really think about it, but there is more or less no bass on that album. The bass is there, but it’s very low frequency. He is a good bass player, but I think he was just exhausted.”
Absence of bass tone aside, Slaughter of the Soul still yields many memorable moments: a deadly sample nod to director Quentin Tarantino’s classic film Reservoir Dogs on the full-throttle “Suicide Nation”; the irresistible hooks of “Under A Serpent Sun” and “Nausea”; a spectacular guest solo from King Diamond’s Andy LaRocque on album standout “Cold"; and the triumphant, darkly suggestive instrumental closer “The Flames of the End.”
Returning to the original question posed at the beginning, what makes Slaughter of the Soul a classic? Arguably it’s the fact that much of what melodic death metal is today can be traced back to this one album.
There’s an undeniable lineage and legacy at play here, one that’s firmly imprinted in the DNA of groups found both within and outside the subgenre, including (but certainly not limited to) fellow European contemporaries like Arch Enemy and Soilwork, ‘New Wave of American Heavy Metal’ flagbearers like Killswitch Engage, All That Remains, Darkest Hour, Shadows Fall, The Black Dahlia Murder, and God Forbid, alongside several prominent metalcore stars of British (Bring Me The Horizon, Architects) and Australian (I Killed The Prom Queen, Confession, Buried in Verona) origin.
Slaughter of the Soul is a bonafide classic because the album’s sonic signature, longevity, and commercial success helped to define melodic death metal’s boundaries and stylistic attributes. Further, it has a musical essence that manages to transcend both categorisation and temporal specificity.
Since At The Gates reunited in 2010 and released three more albums—At War with Reality (2014), To Drink from the Night Itself (2018) and The Nightmare of Being (2021)—the band is often asked about the continuing relevance of Slaughter of the Soul on metal as a genre more broadly.
Comparing their achievements to Big Four giants Slayer (not a totally unwarranted comparison, in my humble opinion), Lindberg makes a convincing case for the album in the wider pantheon of melodic death metal:
“We owe a lot to that record and that part of our career. But we can also, as musicians and songwriters, see that as an isolated moment. That's what we sounded like then; that was our goal then: to make that precise aggressive piece of music. And now we're focused on this. And next time — cause we're always trying to be true to what we do at a certain time — that's exactly who we'll be then.”
You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.