The Nightmare Of Being

With their seventh album, Swedish death metal masters At The Gates have delivered a finely crafted concept album about pessimism. “I guess I had an amateur view of pessimism, as most of us do,” vocalist and lyricist Tomas “Tompa” Lindberg tells Apple Music. “I thought it was just the ‘glass is half empty’ kind of thing.” Some initial research led him back to American author Thomas Ligotti, whose horror fiction Lindberg had read while working on his 2017 side project The Lurking Fear. Then At The Gates guitarist Martin Larsson recommended Ligotti’s nonfiction. “It’s basically an introduction to pessimism,” Lindberg says. “I got about halfway through and realised that this worldview is very death metal.” The result is The Nightmare of Being, a ripping and majestic death metal album influenced by the writings of Ligotti, Emil Cioran, Peter Zapffe and contemporary philosopher Eugene Thacker, whose ideas surfaced in the first season of HBO’s True Detective. Below, Lindberg takes us through each track on The Nightmare of Being. “Spectre of Extinction” “Since [1995’s] Slaughter of the Soul, we’ve written almost every track to fit the sequence and flow of the record. So ‘Spectre of Extinction’ was really written as an opener with the classic metal intro thing—acoustic guitar, big Judas Priest chord swinging out, and then At The Gates after that. The middle part was written specifically for Andy LaRocque to play a solo. I call it the Death part because it really sounds like Human by Death. Lyrically, it’s basically the introduction to the idea that we’re the only species conscious of our own mortality.” “The Paradox” “This is the only one that was not written for this place in the sequence. It was written very early on in the songwriting process, and it turned out to be this weird death metal song, but it has a lot of the classic Mercyful Fate vibes to it—very melodic at certain points. We had it hidden later in the album, but then [mixing engineer] Jens Bogren said, ‘Thi