IN FLAMES TRIVIA
Trivia
In January 2011 Trooper Entertainment reissued eight In Flames albums in Japan on the same day, running from the second record to the ninth. The Jester Race, catalogue number XNTE-00024, gained two live tracks from a September 2004 show at Sticky Fingers and, more oddly, a Commodore 64 karaoke version of Moonshield.
Two of the bonus tracks on the Japanese reissue of Colony come from the band's own November 2000 Tokyo Showdown: live takes of Scorn and Ordinary Story. A Japanese edition sweetened with a recording made in Japan is a neat piece of circularity.
The Japanese reissue, catalogue number XNTE-00029, adds a remix of My Sweet Shadow and a live The Quiet Place recorded at Hammersmith in London in December 2004. The Japanese Clayman draws on the same London show.
Each title in Trooper's 2011 Japanese reissue series picked up bonus tracks drawn from earlier live albums, mini-albums and singles — with one exception. The eighth album, Come Clarity, got none. All of them carry a 2010 digital remaster.
The Japanese label describes A Sense of Purpose the same way — the ninth album, made at the band's own studio. Its reissue catalogue number is XNTE-00031, and the label picks out The Mirror's Truth, Alias and March to the Shore.
The Japanese edition of Battles came with translated lyrics, a Japanese liner-notes booklet and a Japan-only bonus track: an alternate version of Here Until Forever as track fifteen. A mail-order bundle of the CD and a T-shirt with a member-signed card was also sold, limited to 100 sets at 6,000 yen before tax.
The Japanese edition, catalogue number GQCS-90690 at 2,500 yen before tax, carries a Japanese liner-notes booklet, translated lyrics and Not Alone as a thirteenth bonus track. A version with a card hand-signed by Bjorn and Anders was also issued as WRDZZ-843 at 3,500 yen, limited to 100 sets.
The Japanese edition, GQCS-91271, came out on 10 February 2023 with a Japanese liner-notes booklet and translated lyrics. A version with a hand-signed booklet was also sold, limited to ten sets.
The Japanese label profile that puts the count at nine albums and seven Japanese tours traces the same sequence: after the 1994 debut the working territory was Japan and Europe, and North America only opened up in the 2000s.
The Japanese edition of the live release Sounds from the Heart of Gothenburg came with a booklet, and the first-press DVD-plus-two-CD version added Japanese subtitles. The set is twenty songs spanning the debut Lunar Strain to Siren Charms, recorded at the 14,000-capacity Scandinavium arena in the band's home city.
Two things came off the back of Whoracle that Stromblad names in the same breath: a tour with Dimmu Borgir, and the band's first trip to Japan.
The live album The Tokyo Showdown was recorded on the band's Japanese tour in 2000. That fixes its contents: five albums' worth of material up to Clayman and nothing after it. The set also takes a run at Slayer's Raining Blood.
Stromblad's own verdict on The Tokyo Showdown, given in 2008, was blunt: not the best live album he had heard.
The World Colonization tour of 1999 took In Flames as far as Japan and the United States.
In Flames came to Japan for Knotfest before Battles was out, sharing the bill with Slipknot, Anthrax and Lamb Of God, and gave The End and The Truth their world premiere there. It was the band's first show in about a year, with a new album and a new drummer arriving at the same time, and they had forty minutes to play.
One thing Gelotte noticed from the stage that night: the audience was singing the choruses of songs that had not been released yet.
In Flames first came to Japan in 1998, on the back of Whoracle. The visit in December 2014 was their tenth. On that first trip they played Tokyo and Osaka, and what stayed with Bjorn Gelotte was the scale of the cities and the number of screens on them — his comparison was Blade Runner.
Anders Friden has said that outside Germany and Sweden, Japan was the first country to take In Flames' music seriously — by his reckoning about a year ahead of the United States and the United Kingdom.
Asked in October 2002 how many times the band had been to Japan, Daniel Svensson answered four. Set against the tenth visit in December 2014, the pace of the intervening years is easy to read off.
The audiences took some getting used to as well. During the between-song talk the room went silent and then erupted the moment the music started; Gelotte says his first thought was that they had done something wrong. Friden remembers the crowds around that first visit containing people in suits straight from the office standing next to hardcore punks.
Friden has one more memory from those early Japanese trips: an immigration officer recognised the band at the border and told them he would be at the show.
Gelotte's impression of Japan is of a country where metal is still alive — a place where bands whose popularity has faded elsewhere are still followed.
Friden's observation about Japanese crowds is that they seem interested in every band on the bill, not only their own favourite. The welcome, he says, does not come from the audience alone — he feels respect from the crews and staff as well, and describes the Japanese crews as disciplined.
There is a complaint attached to it. Recent visits have been festival appearances with short stays, and Friden wants to come back on a headline tour and see cities beyond Tokyo and Osaka. Gelotte makes the same case from the setlist end: forty minutes is not enough to take even one song from each of twelve albums. In 2019 he added that the band talks about how much it likes Japan more or less daily.
In Flames played the first Knotfest Japan. Friden's view of it was mixed in an honest way: a chance to reach people who do not normally listen to them, and a bill full of friends — but, he said, it feels like a waste to fly to Japan for a forty-minute set. They were back for the 2016 edition, two in a row.
Alongside Knotfest, BARKS lists Loud Park and Beast Feast among the Japanese metal festivals In Flames have played. Loud Park '06 ran on 14 and 15 October 2006 in halls 9, 10 and 11 at Makuhari Messe, with In Flames on a bill that also carried Dio, Slayer, Megadeth, Opeth, Anthrax, Children Of Bodom, Killswitch Engage, Ministry and Hatebreed.
In November 2019 In Flames were named in the first wave of the Download Japan 2020 line-up, set for 29 March 2020 at Makuhari Messe in Chiba with My Chemical Romance headlining. The same announcement carried The Offspring, Evanescence, Jimmy Eat World and At The Gates.
In October 2023 a Japanese run billed as Klash Of The Titans was announced, pairing In Flames with Kreator: 30 January 2024 at Zepp Namba, then 1 and 2 February at EX Theater Roppongi. Tickets were 12,000 yen for first-floor standing and 14,000 for the second-floor seats, tax included, with a drink charge on top.
At a Tokyo show in February 2024 the band played Food for the Gods, from Whoracle, and the interview carries footage of it. The same run also brought out An Ordinary Story from Colony and Graveland from The Jester Race.
There is a record of how Friden spends his time in Japan, too. He had said before that he likes sushi and sake; on the 2014 visit he had the hotel concierge find him somewhere that ran entirely in Japanese, reckoning the food would be better there. In a 2013 interview he mentioned hunting for good sharp knives to take home on his previous trip, and going around talking to people to see the culture.
Daniel Svensson gave a practical account of how Japanese bonus tracks come about. The one on the Japanese Reroute to Remain was not a new song at all; a live Colony from Stuttgart, he thought, though he did not sound certain. They always want a bonus track, he said, because CDs in Japan are so expensive.
The band's own site puts the start in one line: Gothenburg, Sweden, 1990. The same paragraph is how In Flames describe themselves to the world — a group that has toured the planet many times over and left its mark on a good number of the metal acts filling arenas today.
The Japanese label's own copy places Whoracle as the third album, the one on which the band settled the melodic death metal style they became known for. It came out in 1997 with Jotun, The Hive and Episode 666 on it, and the band's first Japanese shows followed its release.
The band's Japanese label treats Colony as the hinge. From that record on, the clean sung parts take up more room and the Nordic melodic writing is used more sparingly, in what the label describes as a large turn of the wheel.
Clayman was the record that first put In Flames inside the Swedish Top 20. A support slot with Slipknot followed.
The Japanese label sold this fifth album as a turn away from the death-metal side of the records before it. It came out in 2000 carrying Pinball Map, Only for the Weak and the title track.
The writing for Battles was done by two people in Los Angeles: Bjorn Gelotte and Anders Friden left Sweden for it and only brought the material to bassist Peter Iwers and guitarist Niclas Engelin afterwards. Days were for writing, evenings for barbecue and beer into the small hours. Gelotte says he was reluctant at the start, but he had a pile of riffs, and once he sat down with Friden it came together fast.
Gelotte's reason for picking Howard Benson is specific. The band met a lot of producers beforehand and he was the only one who did not want to change anything about them — his line was that he was not going to change them, only make them better at what they already did, and that clicked. It was the first time In Flames had let anyone from outside that far into the process.
Eleven songs were planned. Fifteen got written — enough, Friden joked afterwards, for a double or triple album. One track was added to the running order late, because with eleven the band felt the album was missing some dynamic range.
Battles was followed by Forged In Fire, a North American co-headline run with Hellyeah that opened in Orlando on 12 November 2016 and covered 28 cities in the United States and Canada. In January 2017 the band toured Europe with Avenged Sevenfold and Disturbed.
The fourteenth album, Foregone, came out on Nuclear Blast on 10 February 2023, four years after I, the Mask. It had been announced with the single Foregone Pt. 1.
Foregone is the second In Flames album with Bryce Paul and Tanner Wayne, the first with Chris Broderick, and the third made with Howard Benson. Mike Plotnikoff engineered it at Benson's West Valley Recording Studios, and the mix was handled by Joe Rickard — the band's own drummer from 2016 to 2019.
Friden's explanation of the title is short: the lost time cannot be made up, and that is why the album is called Foregone. The lyrical subject is the concept of time itself. What the past few years should have reminded everyone, he says, is that life is precious and time is not on our side — the record is about the few moments left and what is done with them.
The visualizer for Foregone Pt. 1 was made by the Ukrainian graphic designer Oleg Rooz, who used AI technology to produce the images.
Foregone Pt. 2 continues from Foregone, musically and lyrically. The starting point was Friden going back through the catalogue to songs like Moonshield and Gyroscope and noticing the band had not written in that vein for a long time — the Swedish folk flavour in them, brought into the present-day group.
The song that set the direction when writing began was Meet Your Maker — sonically and thematically, by Friden's account, it showed them what they were aiming at. It was released on 10 January 2023 as the fifth single from the album.
Foregone went to number 1 on the album chart in Sweden, and took the top position in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well.
A bonus version appeared on streaming services on 9 February 2024, a year after release: alternative artwork and one additional song, Become One. The band's own explanation was that they do not usually have material left over, but this time they did.
Anders Friden and Bjorn Gelotte appear on every In Flames release since 1995. Friden has said more than once that the writing and arranging is theirs — the others are full members of the band rather than hired hands, but that particular job does not move.
Sounds from the Heart of Gothenburg is also where In Flames returned to Nuclear Blast. The two had worked together from the second album, The Jester Race, in 1996 through to the ninth, A Sense of Purpose, in 2008, and had then been apart for a while. Friden's framing is that band and label have the same shape of history: both started at garage scale and took years to get big. The year before, the band had moved its management to 10th Street Entertainment, whose roster includes Motley Crue and Five Finger Death Punch.
In Flames run a festival of their own. Dalhalla Brinner returned in 2022, drew 6,029 people, sold out weeks in advance and broke the venue's on-site sales record by seven in the evening. Orbit Culture, Lorna Shore and Tesseract supported; the set opened with Scorn, Episode 666 and Stand Ablaze — the last of those played for the first time since 1999 — and previewed the then-unreleased State Of Slow Decay and The Great Deceiver. The 2023 edition ran two days, 25 and 26 August. By August 2026 the festival was being held in Gothenburg itself, as Goteborg Brinner.
The list of bands In Flames have shared stages with runs to Slipknot, Megadeth, Judas Priest, Killswitch Engage, Within Temptation and Lamb Of God, as well as Black Sabbath, Metallica, Iron Maiden and Slayer. It also runs the other way: Ghost and Gojira both opened for In Flames earlier in their careers.
In autumn 2024 In Flames co-headlined a European run with Arch Enemy billed as Rising From The North. At the Birmingham show on 5 October they closed the night with Meet Your Maker alongside Only for the Weak and My Sweet Shadow. That spring they had toured North America with Gatecreeper and Creeping Death, from Portland, Maine on 1 May to Dallas, Texas on 26 May; the autumn bill added labelmates Soilwork alongside Arch Enemy.
As of August 2026 the label was reporting that In Flames were at work on a new studio album. The same announcement set out a spring 2027 run across Europe and the UK and Ireland with Trivium: Trivium headline in the UK and Ireland with In Flames as special guests, and the roles reverse once the tour reaches Scandinavia. Paleface Swiss and Vola support every date.
Anders Friden appears as a guest on Vola's 2024 album Friend Of A Phantom.
In Flames did not begin as a band at all. In 1990 Jesper Stromblad was playing in the death metal group Ceremonial Oath and started this on the side, wanting a little more melody in his life. Three years passed before he committed to it full time, joined by guitarist Glenn Ljungstrom and bassist Johan Larsson.
Asked how big the early Gothenburg metal scene actually was, Anders Friden put a number on it: roughly forty people. Everyone jumped into everyone else's band and helped out.
The three bands that came to define the Gothenburg sound did not meet at a club or a rehearsal room. They met on public transport. All of them grew up in one small corner of the city with a single bus route running into town, and the members of At The Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity rode it together.
Mikael Stanne has listed who was on that bus: the Bjorler twins from At The Gates, Peter Iwers, later of In Flames, Anders Iwers of Dark Tranquillity, Niklas Sundin, Anders Friden and Stanne himself. Once in town they sat in a park with a tape recorder and a lot of beer. That, he says, is where the friendships behind the whole scene actually started.
Mikael Stanne dates his first meeting with Jesper Stromblad to around 1987 or 1988, at a place called Valvet. By his account it was the only underground metal venue Gothenburg had in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which is a large part of why everyone in the scene knew everyone else.
Valvet — the name translates as 'the vault' — was run by a non-profit, and the bands that played there helped run it. Anders Friden credits it as the first place local groups got in front of an audience at all, and as the starting point for a long list of Gothenburg bands. It was eventually shut down and moved elsewhere.
Bjorn Gelotte has described the split between the two Swedish scenes in plain terms. The Stockholm bands were punkier and dirtier, the sound associated with Sunlight Studios. What the Gothenburg groups were after was something a little cleaner, leaning on melody where the other city leaned on aggression.
The man who gave that idea a shape was producer Fredrik Nordstrom. Gelotte credits him with getting the Gothenburg bands into order and making them sound unlike the Stockholm records, and the style is usually traced to the fact that In Flames, Dark Tranquillity and At The Gates all worked with him.
Bjorn Gelotte and Jesper Stromblad were introduced by one of Gelotte's cousins. They lived on opposite sides of Gothenburg and had, by Gelotte's account, identical taste: Malevolent Creation, Cannibal Corpse, Death, the first couple of Gorefest records, some Morbid Angel, and more or less anything with an Ed Repka cover on it.
When the two of them first played together, Gelotte was behind a drum kit. Those jams are where the guitar-led sound In Flames became known for actually came from — written, at the start, by a drummer and a guitarist in a room.
The seat Gelotte was offered when In Flames asked him in was the drum seat. He had been working at youth centres and teaching himself to play there. What made him say yes, by his own account, was not the drums at all — it was that the job came with a share of the songwriting.
There is a simple reason that seat was free. Jesper Stromblad had been playing the drums in In Flames himself, and he wanted to move to guitar. Gelotte's arrival is what let him do it.
The early In Flames formula paired two things: showy guitar lines out of the Iron Maiden playbook, and the speed and growl of Entombed and Dismember. That combination is what got them noticed across Europe, and it is more or less what the term melodic death metal came to mean.
Before music took him, Anders Friden was studying to be an architect. He has put it as metal stealing him away from his education and from a normal life — a line that reads as a joke until you notice he actually was on that track.
Bjorn Gelotte took a different route out of school: two years of training as an electrician, and no college. He has pointed out that he never worked a single day in the trade.
Friden's way in was the Scorpions, at ten years old. From there he worked through the genres in order — heavy metal first, then thrash, then death metal and grindcore — which is the same road that ends at the band he would join.
The 1994 debut Lunar Strain came out on Wrong Again, and the credits are unusual: Jesper Stromblad played the drums and the keyboards on it as well as guitar. The voice on the record belongs to a guest — Mikael Stanne, of the Gothenburg band Dark Tranquillity.
Lunar Strain is the only In Flames album Mikael Stanne sings on. He went on to make his name fronting Dark Tranquillity instead, which leaves the debut as a one-off in the discography in more ways than one.
The instrumental Hargalaten on Lunar Strain is not an In Flames composition. It is a piece of traditional Swedish folk music written to accompany the Harga dance, and the legend attached to it has the Devil turning up disguised as a fiddler and making the local children dance until nothing was left of them but bones. In Flames' contribution was to put an electric guitar through it.
What Jesper Stromblad wanted from Lunar Strain was set out in advance, not arrived at: Iron Maiden's kind of melodic guitar lines, generous acoustic passages, and savage death metal, all in the same record.
The record that resulted put the hallmarks of death and black metal alongside NWOBHM, and — a rarer ingredient at the time — acoustic Scandinavian folk music.
Up to 1995 In Flames was not a band with a settled line-up. The places around Stromblad were filled by a revolving cast of hired players, and the list of who passed through in those years reads afterwards like a who's-who of Swedish extreme metal.
On 22 August 2026, headlining the Goteborg Brinner festival at Frihamnen in their home city, In Flames brought Mikael Stanne back out. The song was Behind Space, from Lunar Strain — the album he had sung on — and this time he shared the vocal with Anders Friden.
The idea of dropping an instrumental folk piece into a metal album was there from the very beginning: both Lunar Strain and The Jester Race carry one.
Anders Friden came in during 1995, after both Lunar Strain and the Subterranean EP were already out. That makes 1996's The Jester Race the first In Flames record with him on it, and it is the one he still names as closest to him.
Two men joined for The Jester Race and neither has left since. Anders Friden arrived from the front of Ceremonial Oath; Bjorn Gelotte arrived as the drummer, and only later moved to guitar — which is worth remembering when his name comes up as the band's principal riff writer.
By 1996 In Flames had a Nuclear Blast contract and a permanent line-up, and The Jester Race came out the same year. That is the point at which the band started to build real momentum.
The Jesterhead was made for a reason as plain as it gets: the band wanted a new face to go with the album. It first appeared on the sleeve of their second record, The Jester Race, and in one incarnation or another it has turned up on every studio album since.
Jesterhead is not only the mascot's name. It is also what the In Flames fan club is called.
The lyrics on The Jester Race came through a third party. Niklas Sundin, the guitarist in Dark Tranquillity, is credited with a heavy hand in them, and the reason was practical: Anders Friden had no confidence in his own English at that point and nobody else in the band could help. Stromblad describes Sundin's job as translating — putting Friden's ideas into English rather than supplying his own.
About a year in, Friden nearly walked. Everyone in the band was working to pay rent, tours were being turned down because of it, and he was asking himself whether he should go and get an education instead. He gave it one more year. The Jester Race came out inside that year, and by his account everything changed from there.
The complaint that In Flames are not extreme enough did not start with their later records. Friden says he was already defending the music on that count as far back as The Jester Race, and then again, and again after that.
At the same Goteborg Brinner show in August 2026, Trivium's Matt Heafy came up for Artifacts Of The Black Rain — a song from The Jester Race, thirty years old that year.
Whoracle was cut where everything before it had been cut, at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg. Stromblad's reason for that is unglamorous: it was the best metal studio in the city and the band's budgets in the nineties would not stretch anywhere else. What did change was the credit — the studio's owner, Fredrik Nordstrom, was brought forward as co-producer.
Three weeks, in late spring and early summer 1997, covered both the basic tracks and the mix. With that little time every song had to be written and rehearsed before the band walked in, and there was none left over for pre-production. One consequence Stromblad points out: Nordstrom had no hand in the songs at all.
Whoracle carries a cover of Depeche Mode's Everything Counts. It was Anders Friden's suggestion, and the rest of the band were reluctant at first because they could not picture how a Depeche Mode song would work for them. It worked well enough that they kept it in the set on the tour that followed.
That cover sits as the last proper track on Whoracle, and it is also the first time Friden takes a real run at melodic singing on record. The In Flames version came out in 1997; Meat Beat Manifesto covered the same song the following year.
Whoracle is often introduced as a concept album — Louder's own A-Z of the band describes it as covering the prelude to an apocalypse, the event, and what comes after. Jesper Stromblad does not agree. Asked directly in 2020 he said that, as far as he knew, it was not a concept album, and added that he had no involvement in the lyrics in the first place.
The tracks that became the Black-Ash Inheritance EP were recorded in the same Studio Fredman sessions as Whoracle, at a point when nobody involved expected an EP to appear before the album at all. What made it one was a marketing idea from Nuclear Blast: put out a shaped disc ahead of the record.
Four tracks went on it: Gyroscope, which also made the album; Goliaths Disarm Their Davids, which the band had decided was not right for Whoracle; a live Behind Space; and an Acoustic Medley stitched together from pieces of their own earlier songs. That last one meant going back into the studio for it alone. The EP appeared in August 1997, the album in November.
Whoracle put In Flames on the charts in Finland and Germany. They were the band's first chart placings, and Louder reads them as the first sign that there was serious commercial potential in what they were doing.
Every member still had a day job up to Whoracle, and the album forced the five of them to choose between the two. Guitarist Glenn Ljungstrom said he could not make that commitment and went back to work. Bassist Johan Larsson fell in love with a woman in America and put his bass down.
The two empty seats were filled by Peter Iwers on bass and Niclas Engelin on guitar — but Engelin was not made a member. He was hired so the band could carry on touring behind Whoracle, and nothing more than that at the time. He is the same Niclas Engelin who would later be known for the band Engel.
Between Whoracle and Colony the band finally settled. Anders Friden lists the five: Daniel Svensson on drums, Jesper Stromblad, Peter Iwers on bass, Bjorn Gelotte and himself. It held through Clayman and lasted more than ten years.
Daniel Svensson joined in 1998, having spent a few years drumming for Sacrilege. The seat was open because Bjorn Gelotte, the drummer until then, had moved to guitar. Svensson's first album was Colony in 1999, and he stayed behind the kit for Clayman, Reroute to Remain, Soundtrack to Your Escape, Come Clarity, A Sense of Purpose, Sounds of a Playground Fading and Siren Charms in 2014.
Friden treats The Jester Race, Whoracle and Colony as one connected trilogy: a dystopia in which humanity gives in to its own follies and is eventually taken over by machinery. He has given the order plainly — The Jester Race is before, Whoracle is the middle, Colony is after.
The arrangement by which Niklas Sundin put Friden's lyrics into English ran up to and including Colony, and stopped there. Friden's English at the time was limited, and the arrangement ended there.
As of 2016, Peter Iwers had played the bass on every In Flames album from Colony onwards.
Clad In Shadows, from Lunar Strain, was recorded again with Friden singing it. Where that version turns up depends on which pressing you have — it appears on different editions of Colony and of Whoracle.
Clayman was made at Studio Fredman with Fredrik Nordstrom in early 2000 — the same room and the same producer as the three albums before it.
The lyrics turned inward on Clayman. The three albums before it had been about the outside world and where it was heading if nothing changed; Friden had reached the point of saying he could not write about Dungeons & Dragons and wars any more.
Only For The Weak was written out of a bad stretch. Friden's long relationship had collapsed and he was, in his words, wrestling with finding himself and his own place in the world — all while the band itself had plenty of momentum. What the song describes is two people damaging each other's mental health.
For Only For The Weak the fast riffing that had filled The Jester Race, Whoracle and Colony was dropped for mid-paced, chord-based guitar. Synthesisers came in as well, and Friden sings cleanly more on this one song than on the previous three albums put together.
Getting that vocal down was not straightforward. Friden was used to cramming in as many words as he could and screaming his lungs out; this song was slow enough that the singing had to function as part of the melody instead. He was not happy with the first few attempts.
Clayman is the first In Flames album with synth playing on it, and the record on which Friden's clean singing stops being an exception and becomes a regular feature. The hooks got more accessible without the intensity being traded away for them.
Clayman is also the album that finally brought proper support tours with bigger bands. Opening in the United States for a hardcore band like Earth Crisis, and for alt-metal acts, is what Friden credits with giving them the confidence to start melding genres.
The moment Anders Friden reaches for is the Metaltown festival in Gothenburg in 2010. The site sat next to the bridge linking the city with the nearest island; In Flames played Only For The Weak, and by his account the bridge's earthquake alarms went off. The festival moved somewhere else the following year.
Only For The Weak went into the live set when it came out and has not left it since.
The Clayman 20th Anniversary Edition, out on 28 August 2020, was remastered throughout by Ted Jensen and came with new artwork in a sixteen-page booklet, a newly written instrumental medley and four re-recorded songs. Howard Benson produced the re-recordings and Chris Lord-Alge mixed them.
That new instrumental is called Themes And Variations In D-Minor and sits at track twelve. The 2020 versions of Only For The Weak, Bullet Ride, Pinball Map and Clayman follow it, and the same five recordings were also issued on their own as the digital Clayman 2020 EP.
The anniversary edition carries Only For The Weak twice — the original, and a re-recording by the line-up of the day. Friden framed it not as an attempt to improve the song but as a way of marking twenty years, something the band had simply let pass for The Jester Race, Whoracle and Colony.
By the time the twentieth anniversary came round in 2020, two men were left from the line-up that made Clayman: Anders Friden and Bjorn Gelotte.
Deluxe and reissued pressings of Clayman add a cover of Strong And Smart by the Swedish punk band No Fun At All. It also turns up among the bonus tracks on the Japanese reissue.
The writing for Reroute to Remain was done in a rented house south of Gothenburg that belonged to Bjorn Gelotte's sister. They were there for two weeks, and the September 11 attacks happened during that stay. Friden was out buying pizza and heard it from his girlfriend on the phone; nobody wrote or rehearsed anything for the rest of that day.
Cloud Connected was the first single In Flames ever released. It was picked out of the fourteen songs on Reroute to Remain on the grounds that it represented the band well.
The words are aimed at the people Friden knew before he was in the metal scene at all. They told him to stop this and get a real job; he wanted to go places and they, as he puts it, were content to sit there in their own little world.
Speaking to Songfacts about the same song, Friden described it as being about his biggest high — the feeling of being really, really happy. The lyric sets that against the negativity other people give off, and makes clear he does not intend to be dragged down by it.
The Cloud Connected video was directed by Roger Johansson, whose other clips include work for Napalm Death and Arch Enemy. It was shot with several cameras set close together, the footage then combined in post so that the background appears to slide along behind the band.
Reroute to Remain is where the producer changed: Fredrik Nordstrom out, Daniel Bergstrand in. Stromblad said afterwards that he was glad when it happened.
A change in how the band judged their own material dates from these sessions. According to Friden the question in the studio started to be: how will this go down live?
Soundtrack to Your Escape was made over two months in a large house in Denmark. Jesper Stromblad's summary of the experience is that they got cabin fever — stuck in one building for the duration.
Soundtrack to Your Escape took the Swedish Grammis for best hard rock/metal album of 2004. In Flames won the same category again in 2006, for Come Clarity.
On 21 February 2005 Nuclear Blast Europe put out a digipak edition of Soundtrack to Your Escape. Its five-track DVD carried the videos for The Quiet Place and Touch Of Red plus Watch Them Feed and Only For The Weak filmed at Wacken Open Air in 2003. The digipak also had different cover art and an extra song, Discover Me Like Emptiness.
The Quiet Place, the second track on Soundtrack to Your Escape, was the album's first single. The band's Japanese label picks it out along with My Sweet Shadow and Superhero of the Computer Rage as the record's signature songs.
Bjorn Gelotte's description of how Come Clarity got made is short: the logistics were a real mess. Guitars and bass were recorded in different studios and the drums somewhere else again.
The title track was written for Friden's daughter when she was two years old, and he has the words tattooed on him. His son saw the tattoo and asked whether he could have a song of his own one day — a request that took a decade to answer.
The Come Clarity sleeve was drawn by Derek Hess, an artist better known in metal for his work for Sepultura and Converge.
Come Clarity came out in North America on Ferret. It sold just under 24,000 copies in the United States in its first week of February 2006 and entered the Billboard 200 at number 58; the album had sold close to 400,000 copies by 2008.
Ahead of its release in 2005, Friden described Come Clarity as a best-of without actually being a best-of, and added that it was like all the albums they had made.
Come Clarity ends with Your Bedtime Story Is Scaring Everyone, placed after Vanishing Light: an ambient, pulsing piece that eventually turns into a heavy repeated chord figure.
IF Studios, the band's own room, was not built from nothing. It is Studio Fredman — Fredrik Nordstrom's place, the one In Flames had been recording in throughout the nineties. Nordstrom's family lived about an hour's drive outside Gothenburg and, by Stromblad's account, he had tired of the daily journey and wanted to work near them. When the studio went up for sale the band took it over and put their own money into rebuilding it.
What they did not inherit was the gear. Nordstrom took nearly all of it with him, so a new mixing board and new outboard effects had to be bought. One exception: Anders Friden had been a part owner of the studio and his equipment stayed where it was. With the band away on tour, an in-house engineer took outside mixing work there to earn some of the cost back.
Building a studio of their own in Gothenburg was, in the article’s words, the answer to getting the vibe back — somewhere they could write a record together again. A Sense of Purpose was made that way — the five of them recording as a band over two months at the end of 2007, which the band had never done before.
The complex was large, and inside it the band kept a small writing room. They went in there every day, worked ideas up and cut the first demos on the spot.
A Sense of Purpose was recorded at the band's own IF Studios in Gothenburg and mixed by Toby Wright, whose credits include Metallica and Slayer. Daniel Bergstrand — who had produced the vocals on Reroute to Remain, Soundtrack to Your Escape and Come Clarity — came in to help with the vocal sessions. It arrived on 1 April, and on 7 April across most of Europe.
The artwork is by Alex Pardee of ZeroFriends, who also drew the sleeve for the first single, The Mirror's Truth. The starting point was Anders Friden’s: build it around the labyrinth game. He sent a rough version over and the artist came back with the finished thing — which is why Stromblad, asked whose idea it was, said he thought it was the artist’s in the end. Asked whether that made it a concept album he answered not really: what they wanted was art that ran continuously through the booklet while you listened.
The Jester is in this sleeve too, and not as a flat emblem: here he has a body, and his hand is the one holding the labyrinth. Stromblad says the figure is worked into the artwork of every release somewhere, and calls him the band's own Eddie.
Sixteen songs came out of the sessions. Twelve went on the album and three onto The Mirror's Truth single. That leaves one, which Stromblad said would come out somehow, someday. A cover version was also recorded in the sessions; he would not name it and said it would never be released.
The Chosen Pessimist was the longest song In Flames had ever recorded. It had been built in the studio by experimenting with different guitars and amps, which is why, at the time of the interview, the band had not yet rehearsed it for the stage at all.
In North America the album came out on Koch Records, following Ferret for Come Clarity. Stromblad said the band had talked to most of the majors around that time and decided to stay with Nuclear Blast in Europe and go with Koch for North America.
Twenty thousand copies went out in the United States in the album’s first week — enough for number 28 on the Billboard 200.
Friden had just become a father when this album was made; Bjorn Gelotte already had two children. Friden was living in Stockholm with his wife and infant daughter, away from the rest of the band in Gothenburg. The anger in his lyrics, he said, had a different source than before — the state of the world his child was walking into.
Asked whether it was a concept album, Stromblad answered not really. The lyrics, he said, are Anders Friden's thoughts about what is going on in his own life and what he sees around him.
Asked to describe the sound, Friden reached for two words that do not usually sit together: analogue warmth, digital anger.
Abnegation, Tilt and Eraser were all cut from the standard edition. The Japanese reissue puts the three of them back as bonus tracks and adds a remix of Alias on top.
In Flames made a habit of putting out one exclusive package per album, limited to 1,000 copies. For A Sense of Purpose it was a wooden labyrinth box — a working one, with the jester engraved on the ball you roll through it — holding an oversized booklet, the DVD and the CD. Stromblad credited the idea to the label rather than the band.
The video for The Mirror's Truth came out of one of a couple of treatments the band was sent by different directors. It shows slaves working in a factory under the eyes of masked guards — and the masked figures on set were about thirty children in costume, which Stromblad found fairly bizarre to stand in the middle of.
Brothers Mange and Viggo Lando turned two In Flames covers into sculpture: the bony raven from Sounds of a Playground Fading, and the Owl Boy from A Sense of Purpose. The raven has also been tattooed on a great many fans around the world.
In 2008 In Flames joined Gigantour across North America, headlined by Megadeth, from mid-April to the end of May. Children Of Bodom, Job For A Cowboy and High On Fire were on the same run. In Flames had a fifty-minute set and went on directly before Megadeth.
Two signing sessions marked the release: the Bengans shop in Stockholm on 5 April, and the Gothenburg branch the day before it.
The tenth album was recorded at the band's own IF Studios in Gothenburg with Roberto Laghi engineering — his other credits include Hardcore Superstar and Sonic Syndicate. Thirteen songs were laid down. The sessions were filmed and released as a run of studio webisodes, the first of which went up in April 2011.
It is the first In Flames album recorded without founding guitarist Jesper Stromblad. He had left in February 2010 in order to go on receiving treatment for alcohol addiction.
The empty seat was handled in two stages. The record itself was made with Bjorn Gelotte as the only guitarist, and Niclas Engelin — who had been supporting the band behind the scenes since Stromblad's exit — came back as a full member from this album onwards. He had already been through the band once, as the touring guitarist hired after Whoracle.
The cover is by Dave Correia: a skeletal raven perched on a clock, its face wrapped in folds of ghostly skin. The bird has since been tattooed on a great many fans and has been made into a sculpture by the Lando brothers.
On the track The Attic an accordion plays the chorus melody where the vocal would normally be. Another song opens with a spoken-word passage before turning into something Friden described as a hard Depeche Mode kind of thing. He flagged both before release as signs that the album would not be what listeners expected.
Friden traced the darkness of the lyrics to what was happening around him: people he knew had died, and children were being born. He had two of his own by then, and said it had of course affected the writing.
The lead single from the first album made after Jesper Stromblad left is, whatever else it sounds like, not a love song — Friden has said so directly. Getting past the obstacles in your life is the subject, and so is the value of telling someone you care about that they are great. The metaphor is heavy on purpose: he wanted the songs left open.
Patric Ullaeus directed the Deliver Us video and shot it in the band's home city, which happens to have a large ferris wheel. That let them play their instruments while riding it, with Gothenburg spread out behind them.
The ropes in the song of that name stand for the constraints and pressures people carry, and in the lyric Friden offers to untie them. In a 2015 interview he put the subject plainly: helping someone, being there for them, and how much that matters when you watch a friend or a family member going down.
Sounds of a Playground Fading went to number 1 in Germany. In the United States it opened with about 14,000 copies and reached number 27 on the Billboard 200.
Europe got two extra formats: a special-edition CD and DVD in an eight-panel digipak with a pop-up feature, the DVD documenting the recording, and a 180-gram gatefold double LP.
The 2014 reissue adds a remix of Where The Dead Ships Dwell by the Brighton group the Qemists.
The Japanese announcement drew attention to how many guitar solos the record carries, and singled out its twelfth track — led into by the introduction that is track eleven, and arranged with strings — as the high point.
The eleventh album was made at Hansa Studios in Berlin, the room David Bowie, U2 and Depeche Mode had all worked in. The idea was Anders Friden's: he had been inside the place a year before the sessions and phoned the rest of the band to tell them they had to record there.
For Friden the room closed a circle. In Flames had covered Depeche Mode's Everything Counts back on Whoracle; now they were recording through the desk on which Depeche Mode's Construction Time Again had been mixed. He had first got into that band at ten years old.
They gave themselves half the recording time they had used on the previous album — six weeks at Hansa. In Flames do not arrive with finished songs; they bring parts and riffs and assemble them in the first weeks of the session.
Daniel Svensson has said that most of the songs were not even written when the band walked in. He had two weeks to record every drum track and come up with the fills. What made that possible, by his account, is that when Bjorn Gelotte presents a riff the pair of them already know what the drums have to do for it to sound like In Flames.
Work on Siren Charms began with no record deal in place at all. The band signed to Epic and Sony afterwards, and the album came out in the United States on 9 September 2014 through Sony/RED.
Siren Charms sold about 9,000 copies in its first American week and entered the Billboard 200 at number 26 — the band's highest United States placing at the time, as their Japanese label pointed out. In Canada it reached number 12 on the Official Album Chart.
The album takes its name from one of its songs. Friden's explanation of the image: a female creature who sings beautifully and lures sailors down to the depths, used here for something in life that charms you while standing for the good and the evil in it at once.
The lead single was Rusted Nail, and Friden told Finland's Kaaos TV that the record company chose it, not the band. Bjorn Gelotte's account matches: they had so many songs they wanted as singles that they handed the decision to the people who had to promote the album.
Both the Rusted Nail video and the one for the second single, Through Oblivion, were shot by the Swedish director Patric Ullaeus of Revolver Film Company AB, whose other clients include Hammerfall, Europe and Lacuna Coil. The Through Oblivion film follows a frustrated office worker getting away from all of it.
Two songs on the album took real work to arrange: Filtered Truth and the title track. Filtered Truth came in many shapes, one of them with an extremely hard intro the band considered throwing out in favour of starting acoustically. The solo it ended up with is built on a repeating phrase that functions almost as another riff.
Bjorn Gelotte admits that In Plain View, which opens the album, is not the obvious choice for an In Flames first track. It has a degree of twist and turn in the rhythm, and that is the idea he started writing from.
Gelotte calls Everything's Gone an old school nod to death metal: as hard and brutal as they could make it while still sounding like In Flames, with, he adds, some Slayer in it. It asks a lot of the drums, and by his account Daniel Svensson enjoyed being asked.
When they first wrote and recorded Paralyzed the band assumed it would be the first single. Once the tempo settled, the chorus turned out big and the keyboards were in, they knew it was going to be played live.
A female opera singer guests on the album's seventh track, When The World Explodes.
Anders Friden's description of the state he was in when the recording finished: close to a week during which he could not get out of bed. Bjorn Gelotte said the album left him mentally wrecked as well.
Before Siren Charms came out, In Flames played a couple of stripped-back songs for iRockRadio at the Bowery Electric in New York — the first acoustic show the band had ever done. A few weeks later they performed Through Oblivion acoustically, backed by a string section, on the talk show Skavlan.
In October 2014 the band announced that they would record shows in Stockholm and Gothenburg that November, for a live DVD, Blu-ray and album planned for 2015. By Bjorn Gelotte's count it had been nine years since their previous live release, Used & Abused... In Live We Trust.
The twelfth album came out on 11 November 2016 — through Eleven Seven Music in North America and Nuclear Blast everywhere else. The two years leading up to it had taken the band away from Epic and away from their long-serving drummer Daniel Svensson, and returned them to Nuclear Blast.
The recording happened in that Los Angeles house too. What the band carried in was, in Gelotte's words, a bag of riffs; most of the songs were finished or arranged on site. Drained, which opens the album, was one of only three written there outright, melodies and all.
The first thing Benson asked for was demos of everything — a blueprint before anyone entered the studio. Until then In Flames had written a song and then simply recorded it, with lyrics and vocal melodies always written on the spot. Friden's assessment is that having it settled in advance saved them time.
Friden chose the title because it was short, sounded good, and was something anyone could recognise. What it refers to is the inner fight that starts the moment you wake up — the one that runs from the age you first begin to think and feel until the day you die.
Two songs went out before the album: The End and The Truth. They were picked because between them they show what the record is, one side each. The videos are a single story split in two — you have to watch both to follow it.
The video for The Truth was built on a cue from Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall — Friden confirmed it when a Japanese interviewer spotted it, adding that the six-person chorus in the film is not only children but includes women in their twenties. Gelotte, sitting beside him, said he was hearing about the Pink Floyd reference for the first time.
Joe Rickard was found in the studio. In Flames flew to Los Angeles without a drummer, intending to finish the album first and hold auditions afterwards. Rickard was already working with Howard Benson; they let him try, and it worked — his style, Gelotte noted, resembled that of his predecessor Daniel Svensson. Once the recording was done they asked whether he wanted to join, and he said yes.
Friden added one more reason it worked out with Rickard: they went to a bar together and got on.
Rickard had been a member of RED, toured with Islander and RED, and recorded drums for RED, Vamps, Starset and Brian 'Head' Welch. Battles was, in the band's own words, the first album they would release without Daniel Svensson since 1998.
Here Until Forever was written for Friden's son, who was eight at the time. The boy had seen the Come Clarity lyrics tattooed on his father and kept asking where his own song was; Friden's answer was that he had not felt able to write something that would do him justice. When the song was finally played to him, Friden says, he cried, because it was about him.
It is the closest thing to a ballad on Battles. The idea started from the previous album having had two slow tracks: this time they wanted a slow song at an upbeat tempo, with the verse drums moving quickly under it and a chorus built to be sung back at them live.
Gelotte pointed out that the band had not written a song that builds all the way through to a big ending since The Chosen Pessimist in 2008, and that they wanted to try the format again.
The lead single, The End, is by Gelotte's description a fairly straightforward In Flames song. The lyric imagines the thoughts of someone who knows they are about to die. Friden traced it to the pace of modern life — the habit of judging people by their looks, their last holiday, the last beer they had.
Like Sand is about insecurity. Friden has said that however much praise his work gets, he still has moments of fighting the same question: is what I am doing good enough?
From Battles onwards Friden started working with a vocal coach, Mark Renk, so that he would arrive at the studio prepared. His range widened in both directions as a result — but the lessons covered more than recording, extending to how to look after his voice before and after a show. He describes his own technique as self-taught and admits he had not pictured himself doing scales next to a man at a piano.
Gelotte explains the difference between the two records by where they were made: Siren Charms under a cold Berlin sky, Battles in Los Angeles in warm weather on a diet of beer and barbecue. Friden's version of the same point is that an album's mood is shaped by circumstances outside the band's control, which is why who you record with, and where, is a real decision.
Friden has noted that Battles was not only their first record with Howard Benson but the first time they had worked with a producer of that profile at all. They have kept working with him since.
The thirteenth album arrived on 1 March 2019, roughly two and a half years after Battles — Eleven Seven Music in North America, Nuclear Blast elsewhere. Twelve tracks, produced by Howard Benson, mixed by Chris Lord-Alge and mastered by Ted Jensen.
After Battles the touring did not stop and almost nothing got written, so the band stood the tour down and built themselves as relaxed a setting as they could manage. Bjorn Gelotte says this record finally gave him the joint work with Anders Friden that the previous few albums had not — the two of them in the studio writing together, which had not happened for some time.
Who is credited and who actually played are not the same thing here. Bjorn Gelotte says he played all of the bass on the album himself. On drums, Tanner Wayne appears on exactly one track and Joe Rickard played the rest — Rickard's own circumstances were not good at the time, and playing on the record was a decision he made anyway.
The title comes from one of the songs on it. Gelotte describes that song as being about hiding your real self behind a mask and protecting it there; the lyric works on several levels, and the example he reached for was social media, Instagram in particular. Friden's version of the same idea is the way people present themselves to others in different social situations.
Friden applies the word to himself. He is by nature reserved and content to keep to himself; fronting a band, he says, comes with a persona and a certain amount of cockiness, and that is when the mask goes on.
The cover is by Blake Armstrong, who lives in Los Angeles and, as it happened, close to the studio the band were using. He was brought in at the demo stage, started producing ideas as soon as he had heard them, and the concept went back and forth from there. It was not his first In Flames sleeve — he had already done several.
This is, by Friden’s account, the first time the band gave the Jester something like a body — and the figure is not the Jester as such. Friden describes a boy abused by his father who sets fire to the house his father is in and, in doing so, accidentally kills his brother. The Jester is the mask that boy puts on to shield himself from the outside and to carry the guilt and the darkness.
There is as much guitar on this album as on Battles, Friden says; what changed is the production and the mix. The single thing the band agreed on going in was to move the guitars a little further forward. Howard Benson and Mike Plotnikoff's team handled the tone, and Chris Lord-Alge mixed it.
The division of labour in the studio was clean: Friden cut his vocals with Howard Benson while Gelotte worked with Mike Plotnikoff. Benson would play something on the piano, Friden would sing over it, and the chorus would be built up from there into something larger than the demo had. Friden's account is that Benson knows when to push and how to bring a singer back to life when he is spent.
Letting go of some control had begun one album earlier, on Battles, when Friden and Gelotte agreed to work with Benson at all. What followed from it was a change of method: the music used to be built in one corner and the vocals and lyrics in another, meeting only at the mix, and now the two of them started from nothing and assembled the songs by throwing ideas at each other.
Friden treats the lyrics on this album as a kind of therapy session: he writes something down, and by writing it he gets rid of it.
The first thing released from the album was the video for I Am Above. Japanese coverage picked out the return of Friden's growl, which the previous few records had kept in the background. Lyric videos followed for the title track and (This Is Our) House, and further films for Call My Name and Follow Me.
Since Battles the band had set up an annual festival of their own in Sweden and toured the world more or less without stopping. The 2019 edition was Borgholm Brinner, held on 2 and 3 August on the island of Oland, with In Flames headlining both nights with special sets.
Friden dedicated the thirteenth album to the band's audience — the reason given being that they are what lets In Flames go on making music and playing it every night.
The entire rhythm section turned over between Battles and I, the Mask. Bryce Paul came in on bass on the recommendation of the band's drummer at the time, Joe Rickard — and then Rickard himself left, citing back problems, and Tanner Wayne, formerly of Chiodos, filled the seat.
The guitar change was more abrupt still. Two days before the American I, the Mask shows were due to start, Niclas Engelin sent a text from a hospital bed to say he could not do it. In the day or two that followed the band received a stack of submissions from available guitarists and picked Chris Broderick, formerly of Megadeth, who learned twenty-five songs in a single day and joined the tour.
Gelotte is specific about who played what. He normally records every guitar part himself; this time he asked Chris Broderick whether he would lay down a solo or two, and Broderick was happy to. Broderick, for his part, says he laid down a decent amount of the soloing on the record. Tanner Wayne's live drums replaced Gelotte's programming, and Gelotte credits Bryce Paul's low end and Wayne's steadiness with changing the songs themselves.
Guitar World's account is that every rhythm part on Foregone was written and played by Gelotte. What Broderick brought was lead work out of a neo-classical and technical thrash tradition, set against Gelotte's slower, hook-led soloing. The band had used guest solos before; having the soloist be a member of the band, Gelotte said, was something else.
The two guitars are tuned to meet. Gelotte's six-string sits in C standard; Broderick takes the low B of his seven-string up to C and puts the remaining strings in C standard to match. Seen from Gelotte's side, the arrangement lets Broderick reach high notes on the first string that C standard on six strings simply does not have.
The schedule is on record. Most of the early writing was done in a four-week session before Christmas 2021; after a break the band reconvened in mid-January and started making actual demos. Recording ran with Howard Benson at four to six hours a day and was largely finished inside two and a half months, at West Valley Recording Studios in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles.
By Gelotte's account the discussions around Foregone were about production rather than songwriting: the aim was a death metal feel and a big wall of guitars again. He points out that his demos for this album do not sound very different from the demos for the previous three or four — which puts the change squarely at the production stage.
The direction was settled during the pandemic shutdown. Friden and Gelotte used the break to work out what they wanted, and the first thing both of them said turned out to be the first thing their producer Howard Benson said as well: bring the guitars and the drums back to the front. Friden's own view was that some of their recent mixes had been too laid back.
State Of Slow Decay, released ahead of the album, was the first wholly melodic death metal music In Flames had released in twenty-two years. Friden was careful to say that this did not mean looking backwards and making The Jester Race Part 2 — that, in his words, would have been stupid.
The word itself was arrived at in the kitchen of Blake Armstrong, the artist who designs the band's covers. He also designed almost all of the material that went out with the record.
Blake Armstrong's connection with the band started at an In Flames signing in Los Angeles in 2012. A long-time fan, he brought a piece of his own fan art along to be signed; the band's manager saw it and handed him a card. He pitched them a comic book off the back of that, and taught himself to paint digitally in order to make it.
The comic was well received, and once he knew the band Armstrong was asked to submit ideas for their eleventh album, Siren Charms. That was his first official album design for anyone, and he has done every In Flames cover since.
The Great Deceiver came out of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The war started in Europe while the band were recording and was on television constantly — just as, in Friden's telling, the pandemic had finally lifted enough for them to travel again.
State Of Slow Decay is about political divides being widened by social media algorithms. Friden's own framing of the album is that he wrote it looking outward at what was around him, where most of the earlier records had been him looking inward and dealing with his own past.
Anders Friden posted photographs from the studio to Instagram on 17 March 2026 with word that the recording was done — a fifteenth In Flames album. It was made again at Howard Benson's Los Angeles studio with Mike Plotnikoff engineering. On 3 February Bjorn Gelotte had posted a clip from the studio captioned simply XV, and Plotnikoff had noted the same day that drums had begun — at Sunset Sound Recorders, studio 2, with Jon Rice playing.
That album is expected to be Jon Rice's first recording with In Flames. He has been touring with the band since May 2025, and before that played with Behemoth, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, The Red Chord, Job For A Cowboy and Scorpion Child.
In 1995 Anders Friden and Mikael Stanne effectively swapped jobs: Friden left the microphone at Dark Tranquillity for In Flames while Stanne, who had been singing for In Flames, went the other way. Stanne's account adds a detail — Friden had been fired from Dark Tranquillity first.
Ceremonial Oath is where a striking number of Gothenburg musicians passed through. It is one of the many bands Anders Friden fronted, and its line-ups also included Jesper Stromblad, Anders Iwers — later the bassist of Dark Tranquillity — and Oscar Dronjak, later the guitarist of HammerFall.
Jesper Stromblad announced that he was leaving in February 2010. His statement said he was determined to fight and defeat his demons once and for all. The remaining members answered that the door to In Flames was always open to him and that they were behind his recovery entirely.
Stromblad's own account of why he left has shifted its weight over time. On Facebook in October 2014 he said the alcohol addiction was only a small part of it and that the band's musical direction no longer matched the vision he had at the start. In a 2023 interview he put it as wanting to stay death metal oriented while certain people wanted something more radio friendly, in a band that was not in a good place. Bjorn Gelotte's version: the addiction was not the only reason but was one of several, touring was part of what was hard for him — and yet he had been involved in the band's direction up to two records before he left, so that is not the whole truth either. Anders Friden's is shorter: they did not part as enemies, they parted because they could no longer work together and did not want to.
In August 2015 Stromblad wrote on his own Facebook page that he had been battling severe depression and anxiety for more than twenty years. By 2023 he was still sitting out live shows with both Cyhra and The Halo Effect in order to deal with his addiction; The Halo Effect covered the gigs he could not play by bringing in Patrik Jensen of The Haunted.
Stromblad's exit in 2010 left In Flames with no original members at all. He went on to form The Resistance with Marco Aro of The Haunted and Glenn Ljungstrom, formerly of In Flames, announcing his departure from that group in March 2016; the same year Peter Iwers confirmed he was working on a new band with him. That band was Cyhra, whose line-up also took in Joacim 'Jake E' Lundberg, previously of Amaranthe.
The Halo Effect, launched in 2021, is five former In Flames members in one band: Jesper Stromblad and Niclas Engelin on guitars, Daniel Svensson on drums, Peter Iwers on bass, and on vocals Mikael Stanne — the man who sang on Lunar Strain. Their debut, Days Of The Lost, went to number 1 on the official Swedish chart.
Daniel Svensson announced his departure on 8 November 2015, saying he would close his chapter in the band once the tour then running had finished. The reason was time with his wife and three daughters. He thanked Anders, Bjorn, Peter, Jesper and Niclas for seventeen years; his later summary was simply that he had grown tired of touring after almost twenty years of it. He also mentioned that he was about to start a brewery of his own.
Svensson and Peter Iwers now run a brewery together, Odd Island Brewing, and Iwers also owns a Gothenburg restaurant called 2112 with Bjorn Gelotte. Iwers says he has no regrets about leaving, while admitting that he sometimes misses being free, out playing shows and travelling somewhere new every day.
Peter Iwers announced his exit in November 2016, saying he was leaving to pursue other endeavours. According to Bjorn Gelotte he had first raised it before the band's autumn 2016 North American tour with Hellyeah, so it was not a shock — Gelotte's reading was that Iwers had always been a busy man and was simply done with this life.
Iwers was not replaced in one move. Hakan Skoger, a friend of the band, played the bass on a UK run and then a European one — he had been in Passenger, the side project Anders Friden and Niclas Engelin ran, and in Engelin's early band Gardenian — but the touring life did not fit his family situation. When the band then went to the United States for Rock On The Range and other festivals they needed someone based there, because there was no time to get a visa, and their drummer Joe Rickard put forward a friend in Nashville. That was Bryce Paul, who learned the songs, met the band in Nashville for two days, and started the tour.
On 8 June 2023 In Flames announced Bryce Paul's departure and Liam Wilson's arrival from The Dillinger Escape Plan in the same statement, thanking Paul for what he had put into the band over several years. Friden's account is that Paul had decided to focus on his family while a European festival was already booked, so something had to happen; it was the band's manager who suggested Wilson.
Liam Wilson's first show with In Flames was at Release Athens on 7 June 2023 — with no joint rehearsal beforehand at all. By Friden's account Wilson rehearsed alone at home and the band met him on stage. Asked how they found him, Friden joked that it was on Tinder. Wilson's own version: he had been in a Clark Kent frame of mind for a while, and putting the Superman suit back on was a matter of seeing whether it still fitted.
Tanner Wayne joined in time for the band's summer 2018 tour, having previously been known for Underminded, Scary Kids Scaring Kids and Chiodos. His first show with In Flames was on 4 July 2018 in Brno, Czech Republic. On 27 May 2025 the band announced their parting from him, calling it a creative decision.
Chris Broderick came to In Flames by way of Nevermore, Jag Panzer and Megadeth. The acquaintance goes back much further than the membership: Friden says they had known him more than twenty years, and the two bands first crossed on a 2002 tour with Jag Panzer and Iced Earth. Broderick's own first contact with In Flames came in the same period, when a label let him into its warehouse and the first CD he pulled off the shelves was one of theirs — his introduction to Scandinavian metal.
When exactly Broderick started playing live with In Flames depends on which sentence you read. Guitar World's own prose dates it to 2017, when Niclas Engelin left; Broderick, in the same article, says he heard through a friend at the beginning of 2019 that the band needed someone to fill in on tour. Louder and Blabbermouth both place the stand-in at 2019, immediately before the American I, the Mask shows.
Niclas Engelin's position stayed unresolved for a long stretch. As of November 2021 he had been absent from In Flames tour dates for two and a half years without ever confirming that he had left. Asked about his future with the band on a podcast in August 2020 he said he would pass on the question, then immediately added that he was still in the band. He was, however, not listed among the members on the band's Facebook page and did not appear in the label's current promotional photographs.
Asked about how many line-up changes the band has been through, Friden's answer is brief: there are different points in life and things happen — but they have never fired anyone.
On 19 April 2022 in Michigan, Lamb Of God played with three guest vocalists because Randy Blythe had covid. Two of them were on the same Metal Tour Of The Year bill: Matthew Kiichi Heafy of Trivium and In Flames' Anders Friden, who took Resurrection Man.
The Metal Tour Of The Year was a 55-date North American run co-headlined by Megadeth and Lamb Of God, with In Flames and Trivium as special guests. It was to open on 12 June 2020; covid stopped that, and a streaming event was held on the date instead, In Flames contributing footage of a 2019 concert. The tour was pushed to 2021 and re-announced as 28 shows, from Austin, Texas on 20 August through to 2 October.
In 2008 In Flames took Best International Band at Metal Hammer's Golden Gods awards.
How many Swedish Grammis awards In Flames have won depends on who is counting. Blabbermouth, writing in 2022, gives three nominations and two wins, for Soundtrack to Your Escape and Come Clarity. Louder's A-Z of the band says four: Best Hard Rock/Metal Album three times — Soundtrack to Your Escape, A Sense of Purpose and Come Clarity — plus a Swedish Export Award. And in 2024 the band's sleeve artist Blake Armstrong said Foregone had been nominated and had won as well.
The Reroute to Remain sleeve was drawn by Niklas of Dark Tranquillity. The colourful In Flames sleeves before it had been Andreas Marshall’s work, and Marshall was an artist a great many power metal bands also used — and Daniel Svensson's explanation for the change is that anyone who only saw the sleeve would take them for another power metal band. The brief was minimal: some lyrics, the title, and do something for us. An older In Flames logo was tried on the artwork and did not suit it, though the logo itself was not replaced.
In Flames wore matching stage clothes in this period — they look more like a unit that way, Svensson said. The outfits were not new; the band had used them for a couple of years in other colours, and the Reroute to Remain run was the white one. A report from a Vancouver show in August 2003 makes a point of noting that on that night they were not in the white jumpsuits.
Reroute to Remain reached the Top 10 in Sweden. The European headline tour around it was the biggest the band had done on their own to that point, in venues holding 1,000 to 1,500 — double the average of the previous headline run, which had been for Clayman. The Stockholm show outgrew a 750-capacity club so quickly that it was moved, and drew 3,000; Gothenburg sold out as well.
In Flames barely went home in 2002. February brought a UK run with Slipknot and American Head Charge, April a US tour with Iced Earth and Jag Panzer, then European summer festivals, then a bill with Slayer until the middle of September, then a tour with Dark Tranquillity and Sentenced, then a European headline run in October with Soilwork and Pain. Svensson's own account is that he had not been home since the previous July, with four days between two of those tours.
Svensson had specific memories of the Slayer tour. They did not speak much with Jeff, but Kerry King was very good to them and would invite them onto the bus after shows for a strange, extremely strong liquor. It was a four-band bill in large venues and the company was close — in contrast, he noted, with headlining the United States on their own, where the conditions were not as good and there were no showers to use.
At Ozzfest In Flames opened the main stage, and the audience was still watching Rob Zombie elsewhere when they started — the seats in front of them were more or less empty. Twenty-five minutes, five songs; people would arrive for the last one. That went on for two months. Stromblad still valued having shared a bill with Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, and said Sabbath's Bill Ward, an In Flames fan, spent a lot of time with them. Friden's view at the time was that he would rather have been on the second stage in front of a crowd that was standing up.
In August 2003 In Flames headlined Vancouver for the first time, at the Commodore Ballroom, with Chimaira and Soilwork supporting. Getting there took six hours at the Canadian border after the previous night's Seattle show, and a planned in-store signing had to be dropped. From the stage Anders Friden delivered a long complaint about the border guards who had kept them waiting, then said he was happy to be in Vancouver. The set ran 75 minutes and there was no encore.
The setlist that night is on record: Episode 666, Only For The Weak, Pinball Map, Behind Space, Colony, Jotun, Gyroscope, and Scorn with a jam of Slayer's Reign In Blood folded into it, plus Cloud Connected, Trigger and Drifter from the album of the moment. At one point Bjorn Gelotte took a Chimaira fan's CD booklet from the crowd and carried it to the side of the stage to be signed.
The 2005 DVD Used & Abused... In Live We Trust is effectively the band's first home video; the only earlier one was a three-way split DVD in 1997 shared with Evereve and Darkseed. It runs over three and a half hours and comes with a 24-page booklet. Disc one holds two concerts: Hammersmith in London on 27 December 2004, cut to 38 minutes with five songs removed, and a show at Sticky Fingers in Gothenburg on 7 September 2004, a club holding about 250 people, where the band played Soundtrack to Your Escape in full before a second set of older material. Friden addressed the home crowd in Swedish.
The same DVD carries seven promo videos — out of the eighteen or nineteen the band had shot by then — and a fifty-minute tour documentary called Jester TV Universal Access, which follows them through helicopter rides in Australia, bullet trains in Japan and European stadium shows opening for Metallica. The set also includes a cover of Pantera's Fuckin' Hostile running into Behind Space.
In 2022 Z2 Comics announced In Flames: The Jester's Curse, a graphic novel that begins with the Jesterhead emerging from the Wasteland. Blake Armstrong oversaw it, wrote it with Ben Laverock and Scott Bramble, and drew it with Scott Dewey; he had been carrying the idea for close to a decade. Edited by Rantz A. Hoseley, it is a 130-page hardcover whose only extra is a small gallery of sketches — and it is part one.
The band's line is that the Jester is worked into the artwork of every release somewhere. How often he is the face of a sleeve is a different number: a 2024 review counts him on five of the fourteen album covers.
Alongside the graphic novel, Aggronautix and Z2 Comics produced a Jesterhead Clock Maker action figure — a three-dimensional version of the character as he appears on the Foregone sleeve, sculpted by Blake Armstrong, limited to 1,000 numbered units and fitted with a glow-in-the-dark clock face.
On 19 July 2024 Nuclear Blast reissued four albums on anniversary vinyl: Lunar Strain at thirty years, Colony at twenty-five, Soundtrack to Your Escape at twenty and Siren Charms at ten, all of them long out of print. Justin Shturtz remastered them for vinyl at Sterling Sound in Nashville; they were pressed at 180 grams in various colours, with the Jesterhead logo etched into side D — except on Lunar Strain and Colony. The original cover art was kept with light touch-ups.
The year before, in 2023, four other titles were reissued: A Sense of Purpose as a fifteenth-anniversary edition, along with Reroute to Remain, Come Clarity and Sounds of a Playground Fading.
In 2014 Century Media licensed the back catalogue and reissued every album in a special-edition digipak. Vinyl came on 180 gram black — except for Lunar Strain and Subterranean, which got no vinyl at all. The releases came in three batches: the first was already out when the announcement went up (17 October in Australia and New Zealand), the second on 20 October (24 October there) and the third on 24 November (28 November there).
On 9 December 2016 Century Media put out a hand-numbered vinyl box: every album plus the Black-Ash Inheritance EP and the 1993 demo, thirteen discs, all 180 gram. David Donnelly remastered them at DNA Mastering; the 36-page booklet carries all the lyrics, the credits and liner notes by Chris Dick, and the EP and demo have etchings on their B sides. The 2,000-copy limit is stated for the world outside the USA, Mexico, Canada and Japan. Retailer variants ran to 100 copies each: clear from CM Distro, white from Nuclear Blast, silver from EMP.
Anders Friden collects whisky. His first reaction to it was disgust; then he got interested in how it is made and became a collector a few years later. In Flames eventually put their name on a drink of their own, working with the Scottish distillery Glenfarclas and later with Box in Sweden — one bottling at 60% ran to 234 units. He brews beer as well, though he is careful to say it is an interest rather than a business.
Several members of In Flames have had bands of their own. Bjorn Gelotte and Jesper Stromblad played together in the alt-metal side project All Ends, and Stromblad was also in Dimension Zero. Anders Friden is described as the driving force behind the melodic death metal band Engel.
The New Wave of American Heavy Metal bands of the 2000s — Trivium and Killswitch Engage among them — cite In Flames, At The Gates and Dark Tranquillity as influences. More recently the British band Employed To Serve said their then-unreleased follow-up to 2021’s Conquering carries a big In Flames influence: singer Justine Jones put it in those words, and Sammy Urwin explained that they had been listening to a lot of Soilwork and In Flames while pushing further into melody.
On 22 April 2026 it was confirmed that the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra would perform music by In Flames, At The Gates and Dark Tranquillity in The Gothenburg Sound, a tribute by the 109-piece orchestra to the late At The Gates singer Tomas Lindberg, at the Goteborgs Konserthus, in the city where all three bands formed. Two concerts were announced, on 4 and 5 December; the orchestra's programme lists three, on 3, 4 and 5 December. Josef Rhedin conducts, and Johan Lindstrom and the composer John Metcalfe arranged the songs.
At that Goteborg Brinner headline set — 22 August 2026, at Frihamnen in Gothenburg — Mikael Stanne of Dark Tranquillity and Matt Heafy of Trivium both came onstage. The same night brought Gyroscope back into the set for the first time since 2012.
In August 2026, more than three and a half decades after the band formed, Friden was asked whether they had known at the time that they were shaping the sound of melodic death metal. Part of his answer: if Iron Maiden happen to be listening, In Flames stole some of their riffs, and that is simply the truth.
Anders Friden has used his name to get something exactly once. A Kiss show in Sweden was said to be barring anyone under thirteen, so he asked for the manager, introduced himself as Anders from In Flames, and got himself and his son into the VIP area.
Friden's picture of the band's early American tours is a queue at a truck-stop pay phone: everybody waiting their turn, each one handing the receiver on saying he had not had time to finish. It was, in his words, like a prison.
At a show in Mexico In Flames went on before their own support act. They had a flight to Europe straight after the show and had to bus to Mexico City to board it, so the running order was moved. The audience did not take it well: they threw things and shouted as the band was escorted out past them by security.
In 2005 In Flames toured the United Kingdom with Motorhead. Friden's summary of it is that the older band put them in front of a crowd that took to them.
Acceptance in Britain came late, and Gelotte is blunt about why: the American touring had to happen first.
The reception at home was not always the good part. Because their first real success came abroad, Gelotte says, coming back to Gothenburg used to mean playing to nobody but people from other bands. By 2016 Friden could say the opposite — that the city is supportive, and that they can come home and play to almost 10,000 people.