With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness

For their second album At the Gates moved to Sunlight Studios in Stockholm, where Tomas Skogsberg produced alongside the band and Fred Estby and Lars Lindén joined him in recording it; the booklet dates the sessions to April 1993. Matti Kärki of Dismember sang backing vocals as a guest. Tomas Lindberg wrote most of the lyrics with help from Alf Svensson, and the credits give the words of "The Break of Autumn" to Svensson and those of "The Architects" to Anders Björler. Peaceville presents it as intricate and melodic yet dark and brutal, touched here and there by black metal, with lyrics of a poetic, philosophical bent. In 2007 Anders Björler called it the band's darkest album and its production heavier than before, though he also named it their weakest, mostly because of that production. Louder heard in shorter songs such as "Raped by the Light of Christ" and "The Burning Darkness" a first sign of the directness that became the band's trademark. "The Burning Darkness" was made into a video. The CD has eleven tracks and the LP ten, without "The Architects"; after the closing "Through the Red" comes an unlisted cover of Discharge's "The Nightmare Continues". The cover uses a work by the Swedish artist Åke Hodell (1919-2000). With the recording done, Svensson left in 1993; Peaceville says he wanted to concentrate on tattooing, comic illustration and his solo project Oxiplegatz. Martin Larsson, formerly of House of Usher, took his place, and the new line-up played its first British show at Rock City in Nottingham before a short UK tour with Anathema and Cradle of Filth. A collector's edition in 2010 carried new liner notes in which Lindberg looked back on the early days and the making of the album, added two live recordings and a demo of "The Architects", and came with a DVD of a show filmed in Groningen in the Netherlands in 1992, on tour with My Dying Bride. In May 2026 Peaceville issued a CD remastered by Dan Swanö.