At War with Reality

At War with Reality was At the Gates' fifth album, their first in 19 years and their first for Century Media Records. The band had split in 1996, and when they announced reunion shows for 2008 in October 2007, Tomas Lindberg said no new record would be made; returning to the stage in 2011, they again promised no new music. The music itself changed their minds, Lindberg said. Anders Björler sent the first new song in the summer of 2013, the band wrote in secret until it had the songs, and in January 2014 they announced the album with the same five members who had made Slaughter of the Soul. It was recorded at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg from 24 June to 18 July 2014 with Fredrik Nordström and engineer Henrik Udd, though the booklet credits the production to the band. Jens Bogren, hired after a test mix of a demo, mixed and mastered it at Fascination Street Studios in Örebro. The Björler twins wrote the music, Anders Björler about 70 percent of it, and Lindberg drew the lyrics from the magic realism of the South American writers of the 1950s and 60s he had been reading. The opening track has the Chilean guitarist Anton Reisenegger reading a passage of Ernesto Sabato's novel Sobre héroes y tumbas in Spanish, titles such as "The Circular Ruins" echo Jorge Luis Borges, and the album title was an old idea of guitarist Martin Larsson's from the 1990s. Costin Chioreanu drew the cover and a separate illustration for every song. The album came out on 24 October 2014 in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Finland, on the 27th in Britain and North America and on the 29th in Sweden. It reached number three in Sweden, 15 in Finland and 25 in Germany, entered the US Billboard 200 at 53 with first-week sales of 7,700, and won the Swedish Grammis for the best hard rock or metal album of 2014. Patric Ullaeus shot the video for "Death and the Labyrinth" in Antelope Canyon, Arizona, and Chioreanu made animated videos for "Heroes and Tombs" and "The Night Eternal".