In Flames: Gothenburg's Giant and the Sellout Wars

There is no argument in metal quite as long-running or as bitter as the one about In Flames. For twenty-odd years a section of their own audience has treated the band as traitors, and the band has kept selling more records anyway. It is a genuinely fascinating fight, because the thing being fought over is not really In Flames at all. It is the ownership of an entire genre.

In Flames formed in Gothenburg in 1990, founded by guitarist Jesper Strömblad, and they belong to the small group of bands who effectively invented melodic death metal on Sweden’s west coast. The full architecture of that scene — the twin-guitar harmonies, the Iron Maiden melodies welded to death metal aggression — is a story I have told at length in the piece on the Gothenburg sound. In Flames were one of its three founding pillars, alongside At the Gates and Dark Tranquillity, and for a stretch in the mid-nineties they were arguably the most tuneful of the lot.

The records that built the church

The Jester Race in 1996 is where the template crystallises. Acoustic interludes, soaring harmonised leads, a sense of melancholy running under the aggression — it is one of the foundational documents of the whole style, and bands across two continents spent the next decade trying to reverse-engineer it. Whoracle followed in 1997 and Colony in 1999, the latter probably the purest distillation of classic In Flames: fast, melodic, endlessly hooky, Anders Fridén’s harsh vocals riding over guitar lines that lodge in your skull for weeks.

Then Clayman arrived in 2000, and if you listen closely you can already hear the argument coming. The choruses are cleaner, the songwriting more direct, the whole thing pointed slightly more toward accessibility. It is still a beloved record — plenty of the sellout faction will grant that Clayman is where the band peaked — but the seeds of the change are audible. In Flames were getting bigger, and they had ideas about where to go next.

Where they went was Reroute to Remain in 2002, and that is the record the wars are really about. Clean singing moved to the foreground. Electronic textures crept in. The songs got shorter, groovier, structured more like alternative metal than melodic death. The Gothenburg gallop softened into something you could imagine on rock radio. To a chunk of the original fanbase this was apostasy, a founding father of the sound walking away from the sound he helped invent.

The sellout wars

I want to be fair to both sides here, because the argument is more interesting than either camp usually admits.

The purists have a real point. In Flames genuinely did change, and they changed away from the exact qualities that made them important. If you fell in love with the band because Colony sounded like nothing else on earth, then Reroute to Remain and the run of albums after it — Soundtrack to Your Escape, Come Clarity, A Sense of Purpose — are a slow retreat from that magic into a more generic modern-metal middle. The harsh vocals thinned out, the intricate guitar work simplified, the melancholy got glossier. Calling that a loss is legitimate criticism. Something real did disappear.

But the sellout charge itself is mostly nonsense, and it is worth saying why. “Selling out” implies cynical calculation — abandoning your art to chase a cheque. There is no evidence In Flames did that. Bands evolve because the people in them get bored of repeating themselves, and Anders Fridén and Björn Gelotte have been consistent for two decades that they simply wanted to write different songs. You can dislike the songs. Calling the men liars and traitors for writing them is a different and less honest complaint. Plenty of the same fans who scream “sellout” also demand their favourite bands never make the same album twice — a standard that only ever seems to apply to bands they already like.

The deeper thing the fight reveals is possessiveness. Melodic death metal fans felt they owned Gothenburg, and In Flames were the band who could be punished for the genre’s dilution into the metalcore boom of the 2000s. Every American band with harmonised leads and a clean chorus was, in a sense, In Flames’ fault — they wrote the blueprint that a thousand bands flattened into a formula. So the fans took it out on the source. It is a strange kind of tribute, hating a band this much for this long.

What actually happened to the sound

Here is my honest read after years of watching this play out. In Flames’ later career is genuinely uneven — some of those 2000s and 2010s albums are anonymous, chasing a modern-metal sound they were never going to dominate — and the band lost something specific and precious when they walked away from the Gothenburg template. Jesper Strömblad’s departure in 2010, tied to his struggles with alcohol, removed the writer most associated with the classic sound, and it showed.

And yet. The band that plays festivals now is huge, tight, and completely unbothered by the twenty-year argument, and their live show leans hard on exactly the material the purists cherish. A modern In Flames set is a negotiation with their own history — the Clayman and Colony songs detonate, the crowd loses its mind, and then a newer, poppier track lands and you can feel a section of the field cross its arms. Fridén, a genuinely funny and self-aware frontman, has clearly made peace with being both a founding father and a heretic. He plays the old songs like he means them and the new ones like he means those too.

The Gothenburg legacy has aged into something larger than any one band, and In Flames’ complicated place in it only proves how much the sound mattered. The scene’s export power was extraordinary — the same country produced the precision-engineered heaviness of Meshuggah and the progressive sweep of Opeth, and Sweden’s west coast specifically seeded a melodic-death lineage that conquered the world through imitation. In Flames wrote a foundational text and then refused to stay its prisoner. The fans who never forgave them are, in their fury, paying the highest compliment available: they cared enough about The Jester Race to spend twenty years grieving that it ended.

What the fight teaches about scenes

Step back from In Flames specifically and the sellout wars become a case study in what happens to any underground that succeeds too well. A small group of friends in Gothenburg invents a sound in the early nineties. It is strange and local and belongs to a few hundred people. Then it turns out to be commercially enormous — the harmonised leads and clean-chorus template becomes the backbone of an entire international genre a decade later — and suddenly the thing those few hundred people loved is everywhere, flattened and copied and sold. The grief that follows is real, and it needs a target.

In Flames became the target because they were both the source and the survivors. At the Gates broke up in 1996, right at the peak of the classic era, and so froze in amber as untouchable legends. Dark Tranquillity stayed closer to the original template and kept a smaller, more loyal following. In Flames were the band who got huge, changed, and stuck around to be blamed for it. Their crime, in the eyes of the purists, was refusing to die at the right moment and refusing to repeat themselves afterward.

I have watched this pattern play out with other scenes and other bands, and the shape is always the same: the act that carries an underground sound into the mainstream absorbs all the resentment that the mainstream itself deserves. It is easier to hate a band than to hate the market forces that turned a beloved local style into product. In Flames stood in for those forces. That is a heavy and slightly unfair thing to be, and they have carried it with more grace than most.

The verdict that isn’t one

I do not think In Flames sold out. I think they got bored, took some swings that missed, wrote some songs that betrayed their own gift, and also grew into a band that can headline European festivals and make ten thousand people scream. Both the disappointment and the success are earned.

The sellout wars will outlast all of us, because they were never really about the music. They are about what happens when a small underground scene produces something so good the whole world copies it, and the people who were there first have to watch it turn into product. In Flames were the band unlucky and important enough to become the battlefield. That is a rough legacy. It is also, when you think about it, a measure of exactly how much they achieved in a Gothenburg rehearsal room in the mid-nineties, back when nobody was arguing yet because nobody else sounded like them at all.