The Gothenburg Sound: How a Swedish City Rewired Metal's Melody

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Every so often a single city coughs up a sound so distinct that the geography becomes the genre. Gothenburg, the rainy industrial port on Sweden’s west coast, did exactly this in the early 1990s. A handful of young bands there took death metal, the ugliest and most extreme form heavy music had yet produced, and did something nobody expected: they made it sing. The result got labelled the Gothenburg sound, and its DNA is now so widespread that most metal fans hear it every day without knowing where it came from.

In Flames: Gothenburg's Giant and the Sellout Wars

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 09:00:00 +0000

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.

In Flames on vo.rs

The Gothenburg Sound: How a Swedish City Rewired Metal's Melody

In Flames: Gothenburg's Giant and the Sellout Wars