In the eyes of certain extreme metal fans, to change is to die. Intelligible lyrics are a sign of weakness, while having more than 10 Facebook fans means that you might as well be The Beatles. So, for Swedish death metallers Tribulation, incorporating passages reminiscent of Deep Purple, Mercyful Fate and Sisters Of Mercy into their third album, 'The Children Of The Night', was something of a risky strategy.
“We don’t make music to satisfy anyone’s expectations; that would be a bit stupid,” Adam Zaars, the band’s guitarist, responds. “We didn’t really decide to change, it was just something that happened. It’s a natural outcome of the way we work. We don’t analyse our own music and we never try to keep it in one place. We do quite the opposite and rely heavily on intuition.
“We noticed where 'The Children Of The Night' was heading quite early on, but my initial idea was something quite different. I thought it would be longer and more psychedelic. That’s the beauty of writing music for this band – you never really know where it’s going to end up.”
Well, he's got that right. Nobody could have seen this one coming. 'The Children Of The Night' rocks and rolls with the best of them. Melancholia and The Motherhood Of God ooze with NWOBHM-inspired guitar leads, while Själaflykt plods along at a funereal, doomy pace, church organs madly flailing in the background. The paint-stripping bark of vocalist Johannes Andersson may be a bit Marmite, but it's a powerful tool, never deviating from the music's purpose nor hogging the limelight. Which is handy, because it is very dark indeed.
This is still death metal but blackened to the core and channelling all sorts of sonic nastiness. There's a brutality and gruffness to it, but the instrumentation itself could woo a fan of ‘70s rock as much as it could a Dissection nut. On paper, it sounds scattershot, but it's so regimented and tight that it never wanders.
“We tried as much as possible to limit external influences,” Zaars says. “We wanted to let the music grow and develop within the confines of the band itself, but I also think we embraced the bands that have always been with us since the very beginning, like Iron Maiden and Kiss. I guess it just had to happen at some point, and now it has.”
While the band's heroes have seeped through the cracks and influenced the expansive nature of 'The Children Of The Night', the band also went as far as to record a cover track for the special edition of the album. Said cover takes the form of One Hundred Years, originally performed by those loveable, mardygoths in The Cure.
“A close friend wrote a very in-depth review of 'The Formulas of Death', [Tribulation's second album] and mentioned One Hundred Years,” Zaars explains. “It became a part of the band at that moment, then Jonathan [Hultén, guitar] proposed that we should make a cover of it. It’s a great song – and a great band – and I think our cover actually turned out surprisingly good.”
The entirety of 'The Children Of The Night' is, in fact, surprisingly good. From a band who, six years ago, were churning out exemplary but somewhat unimaginative death metal on their debut album 'The Horror', Tribulation have undergone a fascinating metamorphosis.
“I hope it can take the listener on a journey and create a separate space where whoever is listening can go to,” Zaars adds, summing up. “It feels like our most important album so far, but every step has been important.”
Tribulation’s first two releases showed incredible promise. With the release of 'The Children Of The Night', our suspicions have been confirmed. They’re now the real thing. The band have finally broken free of genre conventions and, in doing so, they've churned out their most eclectic and uncompromising release to date. Your dad could still hum along, though.
'The Children Of The Night' is out now.
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