by BRIAN GIFFIN
AFTER three previous attempts at this interview, Mikael Stanne of Dark Tranquillity has finally logged into the chat. I’ve just told him a story about the first time I saw the band, at the Manning Bar in Sydney, when I had resolved to dive into the crowd if they played “The Treason Wall” from Damage Done.
It was the first song they played that night, giving me no time to warm up to it. Nevertheless, I did what I promised to do.
Stanne laughs and thinks for a moment.
“That was maybe ten years ago?” he says. His recollection is a little off: it was actually September 2006. But it has been over ten years since Dark Tranquillity was in Australia.
“It’s not for lack of trying,” says the singer, “but it’s just been really difficult to get a tour going. But it’s finally happening and we’re going to be travelling every day for three weeks. Quite exhausting, but we’re going to be fresh at least when we get to Australia.”
Last year they toured relentlessly from July until November. Australia will be their first stop on the next leg.
“When we began this touring cycle after we released Endtime Signals last year we wanted to make sure we toured as much as we can, get to all the places we haven’t been for a while – or never been – so this is going to be one hell of an extensive touring cycle, so I’m really excited about it.”
Endtime Signals is the thirteen album for Dark Tranquillity, a band hailed as progenitors of Sweden’s “Gothenburg sound”. Formed (as Septic Broiler) in 1989 when Stanne was only 15, they set out to be different right from the beginning, even if their early ambitions were outweighed by budget and inexperience.
“We had no idea what we were doing, and neither did the people we were recording it with,” Stanne remembers about 1993’s debut album Skydancer. “They were just like us, but they were saying ‘There’s too much distortion… Do you have to scream all the time?’ We believed we knew what we were doing. We didn’t obviously, but it was interesting and fun and I remember we were so happy that we were finally making an album, and now we could do anything. Professional studio, we can do anything. But of course that was our first reality check.”
Hampered by time constraints and financial resources, the result was less ambitious than they had planned but also quite different from what death metal was at the time.
“It wasn’t a very ‘death metal’ death metal album,” Stanne suggests. He was the band’s guitarist at the time. “I remember playing it for some friends, some really hardcore death metal guys, back in the day, and they were like, ‘I don’t know about this. There’s clean vocals, there’s acoustic guitars, there’s a ballad on there’.”
It may have been flawed, as so many debut albums are, but it set them apart.
“That was our ambition: to show that things could be different in the world of death metal. If we wanted to be part of it, it had to be on our own terms, something different from all the rest. We cannot be better than all our favourite bands, just different. That’s how it started, and we’ve been fine-tuning that formula for 30 plus years.”
Dark Tranquillity has since established a very identifiable sound that has been maintained even through a string of line-up changes and stylistic variations. It’s a facet of the band that Stanne is extremely proud of.
“It doesn’t get easier when you write a new album, but I think we come up with the same core ideals we had when we started. To be melodic, angry but also honest, upfront and different. If anything sounds like anything else, throw it away. If it sounds like anything we’ve done in the past, throw it away. Always try to not repeat ourselves. It’s been important to us to push forward, and made these steps along the way, like Projector for example, from 1999, was very different. We just wanted to show to everybody that we’re not just a Gothenburg death metal band. We can be more. That’s how we felt. Then in 2005 we thought maybe we can go back to being that brutal death metal band again, with Damage Done.”
Stanne is now Dark Tranquillity’s only remaining original member but he feels that the vibe has been maintained. While no longer an active member, former guitarist and graphic designer Niklas Sundin still contributes to the songwriting and ex-bassist Martin Henriksson is now their manager. The main writers are keyboardist and producer Martin Bränström, a member for 26 years, guitarist Johan Reinholdz – who stood in for Sundin for several tours until becoming his replacement in 2019 – and Stanne himself.
“Everybody’s still highly involved in the decision making,” Stanne explains, “and also in the music as well. Niklas even wrote all the parts for one song on the album [“False Reflection”], and he hasn’t done that since about 2015 -2016. So it’s important to keep that core group in order to keep everybody in check. It’s easy to go your own way when you’re writing. Everybody has a different idea. Our band has always been about compromising until we get it right. We have a good foundation together, but let’s build on it and make sure everyone’s happy. If six people are happy about the direction of a song, then hopefully more people will enjoy it, rather than one singular vision. That’s always been the way we’ve been writing music.”
The previously-mentioned Projector was quite a departure from the band’s signature style. An injection of keyboards and dark melancholy proved to be a hard pill for some fans to swallow at the time.
“I totally get that,” Stanne says. “If I like a band and they go in a different direction, I can be like, ‘I’m not so sure about this. You think that you’re never going to get an album like that one that got you into the band, again. You’re worried. I get that! Music is important. I love how people were up in arms about it. But it’s not necessarily a new direction, just something we need to do. Part of us just wanted to get away from the whole genre of Gothenburg death metal, because it just felt too restrictive. It gave us some studio ideas and tools to use further down the line.”
2010’s We Are the Void marked another change in the band’s overall writing habits.
“We Are the Void is so diverse because that’s when we all wrote a few songs and they’re all very different from each other, so it’s a very different album because of that.”
Endtime Signals, on the other hand, was quite directed: “Our latest one is just Johan, Martin and I, and that’s the most singular vision we’ve ever done. I think it’s one way to go. We talk about everything and then we try to achieve it, we discuss what we wanted and we tried to make it happen. I enjoyed it. It was very different, writing like that.”
One song on Endtime Signals has special significance for Dark Tranquillity. “One Of Us is Missing” was constructed from music left to the band by late guitarist Fredrik Johansson, who succumbed to cancer in 2022.
“It was definitely the hardest one to write for this album,” Stanne says. It’s clear he is overcome by emotion. “We decided we wanted to work on a song based on music Fredrik wrote when he was battling with cancer. He gave us this music and he was like, Do whatever you want with it. If you want to use it, fine, if you don’t want to use it, that’s fine too. This is just something I’ve been doing to keep my sanity’.”
Bränström and Reinholdz went to work with Johansson’s ideas, and the song was born. What started out as a tribute to their fallen friend became something much deeper and even more special.
“It was just supposed to be a tribute to him, but it ended up being about him, and also maybe about us, and how difficult it is to deal with the loss of a dear friend. It’s also about him and how bravely he dealt with it and how matter-of-fact he was with it. He just accepted it for what it was, and that helped us as well. There doesn’t have to be a reason, it just happens sometimes, and as frustrating as that can be, the way he dealt with it helped us to deal with it too.”
DARK TRANQUILLITY are in Australia from Wednesday.
FEBRUARY 26: Max Watts, Melbourne
FEBRUARY 27: Crowbar, Sydney
FEBRUARY 28: The Brightside, Brisbane
