At The Gates To Drink From The Night Itself

AT THE GATES are innovators. From debut album, The Red In The Sky Is Ours, through comeback stunner, At War With Reality, the Gothenburg-based death metal act have always traversed the left-hand path on their own terms. The Swedes are keenly aware of who they are, where they come from, and how they got to where they are today. In the ‘90s, AT THE GATES spearheaded The New Wave of Swedish Death Metal. In the aughts, then-swansong album, Slaughter Of The Soul, served as a feature-rich treasure chest for a host of upstarts to plunder. When AT THE GATES returned in 2008—a full 12 years after they disbanded—their return was celebrated and the follow-up to Slaughter Of The Soul—now placing handsomely on Top Metal Album Lists—hotly anticipated. Now, four years after At War with Reality, the Swedes are ready to show their indomitable spirit, ceaseless ingenuity, and raw power on new album, To Drink From The Night Itself.

The Swedish heavy metal legends' seventh full-length effort, Nightmare of Being sees At the Gates continuing to tweak their Gothenburg-style death metal with wild abandon. A blistering chimera of discord and melody, the ten-song set builds on the promise of its predecessor, 2018's To Drink from the Night Itself, delivering deft arrangements, surprising sonic detours, and lyrics steeped in existential dread. Softly fingerpicked classical guitar sets the table on the crushing opener "Spectre of Extinction," which pairs the band's signature guitarmonies and galloping blast beats with Tomas Lindberg's choked but powerful death-metal howl…

The digital EP "With The Pantheons Blind" contains all six bonus tracks from "To Drink From The Night Itself" recording sessions, now available digitally for the first time: "Daggers Of Black Haze" and "The Mirror Black" featuring guest vocals by Rob Miller (AMEBIX, TAU CROSS); "The Chasm" featuring guest vocals by Per Boder (GOD MACABRE); "A Labyrinth Of Tombs" featuring guest vocals by Mikael Nox Pettersson (CRAFT); a demo version of "The Chasm" and a merciless re-recorded version of the early AT THE GATES classic "Raped By The Light Of Christ", originally featured on the band's sophomore album "With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness" from 1993.

AMERICAN EPIC, a film series produced by Allison McGourty, Duke Erikson and Director Bernard MacMahon, explores the pivotal recording journeys at the height of the Roaring Twenties, when music scouts armed with cutting-edge recording technology captured the breadth of American music and discovered the artists that would shape our world. The recordings they made of all the ethnic groups of America democratized the nation and gave a voice to everyone. Country singers in the Appalachians, Blues guitarists in the Mississippi Delta, Gospel preachers across the south, Cajun fiddlers in Louisiana, Tejano groups from the Texas Mexico border, Native American drummers in Arizona, and Hawaiian musicians were all recorded. It was the first time America heard itself.