Album review: At The Gates – The Ghost Of A Future Dead

Through the sadness of the news that Tomas Lindberg had died last September, there was also no finer tribute to the man than the sheer volume and breadth of salutes that followed such unhappy tidings. Through his work with At The Gates, Lock Up, Disfear, Skitsystem and many others, Tomas’ music touched and influenced so many, from so many different places, in the metal and hardcore underground, and far above it, in particular 1995’s future-defining Slaughter Of The Soul masterpiece.

His caustic vocals could be easily picked out a thousand yards away, while his lyrics came with a fierce, incisive and introspective intelligence that set him apart from his death metal peers back in his youth. Plus, he was an absolute metal maniac, whose music boiled with a vitality and energy that only comes from those truly obsessed with it.

Though it is a uniquely bittersweet thing to hear an artist’s final work after they are no longer with us, The Ghost Of A Future Dead (recorded two years before his passing) also captures Tomas Lindberg in all his furious finery. Out of context, it stands tall among their best records. In it, Tomas’ last album becomes a powerful, cathartic epitaph for one of metal’s greatest talents.

Everyone involved is on fire from the moment opener The Fever Mask explodes, a tangle of icy, fast riffs, dissonant barbed-wire melodies and overbearing power. On The Dissonant Void, with its chunky, pummelling verse and vast, minor-key chorus, the band have such velocity you feel they couldn’t stop if they wanted to. A Ritual Of Waste, meanwhile, is the sort of dark thrasher At The Gates perfected years ago, and still nobody else could touch.

Tomas himself is on truly grand form. The broken-glass screams sound as if they’re coming from the very pit of his soul, while the way he uses it, an oddly tuneful instrument, is what gives these songs their vitality, their life. Even three decades after truly redefining metal on Slaughter Of The Soul, even as a man in his 50s, the urgent fire isn’t dimmed one bit here.

These are, of course, the most unpleasant circumstances in which a band can release their music. But against that, it’s also a wonderful, beautiful thing to have a final offering in which an absent friend is shown in their best, most blinding light. Rather than a sad lamentation, it blazes with the incandescence of one truly alive.

Verdict: 5/5

For fans of: The Black Dahlia Murder, Slayer, Carcass

The Ghost Of A Future Dead is released on April 17 via Century Media