Melodic Death Metal on vo.rs

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.

Amorphis: Finland's Kalevala Metal

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Most bands pick a lyrical theme and abandon it inside two albums. Amorphis found theirs in 1994 in a book of nineteenth-century Finnish folk poetry and have been mining the same seam for three decades, which is a large part of why they still sound like nobody else. The Helsinki band took the Kalevala — the national epic Elias Lönnrot compiled from oral Karelian runes and published in its full form in 1849 — and made it the spine of a career that has run from raw death metal to sweeping, keyboard-lit folk metal without ever once feeling like a costume change.

Amon Amarth: Viking Metal as a Stadium Sport

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 09:00:00 +0000

At some point in the last decade a Swedish death metal band from a Stockholm commuter suburb started arriving on stage inside a giant Viking helmet, flanked by inflatable warriors and a longship, and the crowd started rowing. Actual rowing. Thousands of people sitting on the floor of a festival field, pulling imaginary oars in time. That is Amon Amarth in 2023, and getting there took thirty years of very committed hard work.

Arch Enemy: Melodic Death and the Frontwoman Era

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000

The single most important thing Arch Enemy ever did had nothing to do with a riff. In 2000 they hired a woman to do the growling, and in doing so they quietly dismantled one of extreme metal’s dumbest assumptions — that the person delivering the guttural roar had to be a man. Two decades and two frontwomen later, that decision looks like one of the more consequential hires in modern metal.

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.

Children of Bodom: A Finnish Farewell

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 09:00:00 +0000

A year ago today, on 29 December 2020, Alexi Laiho died at his home in Helsinki. He was 41. His management confirmed weeks later that the cause was degeneration of the liver and pancreas connected to long-term alcohol use. For a generation of guitar players he was the closest thing extreme metal had to a Malmsteen with a blast beat, and his band — Children of Bodom — had already played their last show a year before that, so the news landed as a double loss: first the group, then the man who was its whole reason to exist.