Slaughter of the Soul

Slaughter of the Soul was At the Gates' fourth album and their first for Earache Records. On Terminal Spirit Disease the band had begun to strip away the excess and become more direct and more brutal, and Tomas Lindberg called that record the embryo of this one; here they went further, aiming, he said, for a record to stand beside Slayer's Reign in Blood and Exodus's Bonded by Blood. Before the sessions, a tour with Séance meant to run to 40 dates collapsed after two shows when the promoter left with the money, stranding the band in England; Lindberg said that anger can be heard in his lyrics, which turned from fantasy to real life and social issues. It was recorded and mixed at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg between May and July 1995 with Fredrik Nordström, who moved up from 16 to 24 tracks for the sessions, an outlay that led to a few arguments. The band had about six weeks, twice what they had been used to. Lindberg sang his parts in three days, and the "Go!" that launches the title track took more than 40 takes. Andy LaRocque of King Diamond, whom Nordström knew, played the guest solo on "Cold" in about an hour and doubled it with a harmony. The opener, "Blinded by Fear", was the last song written; Anders Björler put it together in a few hours. Earache released the album on 14 November 1995, with a sleeve of guns and religious imagery by Lindberg's childhood friend Kristian Wåhlin. The "Blinded by Fear" video became a fixture of MTV's Headbangers Ball, Sweden's Close-Up magazine named it the album of 1995, and it was nominated for a Swedish Grammis. After months on the road in Europe and America, Anders and Jonas Björler left and the band split in 1996. Its reputation grew in their absence: Decibel made it the second entry in its Hall of Fame in 2005, Rolling Stone placed it 79th among the greatest metal albums in 2017, and American bands such as Killswitch Engage and Trivium have acknowledged their debt to it. It stayed their last album until At War with Reality in 2014.