Metal
Century Media have released the animated film covering the whole of «The Ghost of a Future Dead», At the Gates’s eighth studio album. It’s not a stretched-out music video or a collection of loose clips: it’s a continuous visual narrative running from the first track to the last, made by Costin Chioreanu and his studio Twilight 13 Media, who’ve worked with the band for years. The label paired it, on the same day, with a set of animated videos for individual tracks from the record, so the material can be watched whole or in parts.
The record came out on 24 April this year, recorded and mixed by Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios in Örebro with cover art by Robert Samsonowitz, and it gave the Swedes the first number one of their career on their own country’s sales chart. Credited on it are Tomas Lindberg on vocals, Anders Björler and Martin Larsson on guitars, Jonas Björler on bass and Adrian Erlandsson on drums. «It’s by far the most intense project I’ve ever done,» says Chioreanu, who says he’s above all glad to have been able to finish this monument for his friend.
Lindberg was diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma in December 2023. He recorded these vocals the day before going into surgery, with the idea that they’d be guide takes to work on further down the line, and he died on 16 September 2025, aged fifty-two. Those are the takes that ended up on the record exactly as they were recorded.
At the Gates formed in Gothenburg in 1990 and released «Slaughter of the Soul» in 1995, the record that set much of melodic death metal’s vocabulary and left a recognised mark on the later generation of American bands in the genre. The band broke up in 1996, returned for a reunion tour in 2008, and didn’t release new material until «At War With Reality» (2014), followed by «To Drink from the Night Itself» (2018) and «The Nightmare of Being» (2021). Lindberg had also sung in Skitsystem, Disfear, Lock Up and The Lurking Fear. The band hasn’t announced yet what it will do from here.
Text by Roger Estivill