At The Gates – The Nightmare of Being (2021)

With the latest At The Gates album, metal migrates into its 1970s roots with a combination of proto-metal, avantgarde jazz, and progressive rock, eliminating the complex structures of death metal for the winding thematic forms of 1960s adventurous rock.

Since reaching musical maturity with Terminal Spirit Disease, At The Gates has struggled to combine its aspirations toward the transcendental on City of Screaming Statues with the hook-driven, evocative and instrumentally advanced acoustic material toward the end of the album. With The Nightmare of Being, the band has resolved the two by aiming for an ambience of melancholy and emptiness in progressive rock songs that incorporate mostly speed metal riffs.

Allowing the band to avoid the more percussive attempts of recent prior albums, this new style lets the band do what it has wanted for some time, which is to interweave themes throughout an album while enjoying the flexibility to throw in more conventional advanced instrumentation. It hits the ear like a progressive metal album, but over time modulates into more of an exploration of the 1970s rock that always inspired this band but never poked through until now.

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8 thoughts on “At The Gates – The Nightmare of Being (2021)”

  1. A dick says:

    He sounds like someone’s grandpa with a 3 pack of unfiltered Camels a day habit. This would be boring as instrumentals. No, this won’t do.

    1. Unfiltered Camels are the best Camels however.

  2. Joselito says:

    Both music and article leave something to be desired. I mean, it’s okay, I guess.

    1. The worst review, and yet 99% of all reviews, is the standard review:

      It’s good if you like that sort of thing.

      And yet socially, or in terms of human socializing, that’s the right response every time. Offend no one, but don’t stick your neck out.

      In this case, the review is here to chart the course of this band and the assimilation of heavy metal, plus to point out that this album is markedly better than anything from this group since they went astray with Slaughter of the Soul and the first The Haunted album in the late 1990s.

  3. lordxxx says:

    I think that all these recent reviews leave a lot to be desired

    1. If you feel strongly about this, go ahead and submit your reviews.

      If not, kill yourself and tell Michelle Carter I actually read the court opinion.

      1. Gnarly says:

        “If you feel strongly about this, go ahead and submit your own music. If not, kill yourself.”

        ~every musician who got a negative review on DMU, probably

        1. Then again, most of them realize that writers must write, and musicians must… musish.

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