Sign of Madness

Sign of Madness is the record where the band set about breaking their own sound. Matti Alfonzetti came in for Thomas Thorsén — regarded as one of the strongest singers in Sweden, with a lot of big names behind him. But the genuinely strange choice was the producer: Tomas Skogsberg, the man the band themselves call the king of trash, and the man who built the sound of Stockholm death metal. The reasoning was plain. They wanted to be rawer, and if anyone could do it, it was him. So they got in touch, and by the band's account Skogsberg immediately liked the idea of melodic hard rock and AOR recorded more aggressively. A Nordic melodic hard rock band had deliberately hired the architect of the opposite sound. Given that the two records before this sat inside the template, the choice of producer is itself the answer.