METALITE Trivia — 15 Entries
15 sourced facts about METALITE.
Trivia
Each of the first three albums has a Japanese edition with one song the rest of the world did not get. The band's own release list files those editions as separate entries and marks the extra song "Japanese Bonustrack" in each case: a piano version of "In the Middle of the Night" on Heroes in Time, "Riders of the Storm" on Biomechanicals and "Aftermath" on A Virtual World. The two bonus tracks on Expedition One are on the international digital edition as well, and the Japanese Discovery holds the same twelve songs as everywhere else — so the run of Japan-only songs turned out to cover exactly the first three records.
The band began in Stockholm in 2015, started by guitarist Edwin Premberg and vocalist Emma Bensing. Premberg wrote the music and the words and took charge of how the records were made. The band's own press text says they have been pushing at the edges of the genre since they formed, and names the 2017 debut Heroes in Time as where that started. One of the two founders left two years after the debut; the other is still doing the same job.
The Danish engineer Jacob Hansen has worked on all five of their albums. He produced the debut, Heroes in Time, outright and has mixed and mastered every record since. The band's own press text and the announcements from both AFM and Reigning Phoenix Music all introduce him the same way, by naming Volbeat, Evergrey and Amaranthe. Three labels, a change of singer and two changes of drummer later, the one person finishing the sound has not moved in a decade.
The debut has two guests on it. By the band's own press text, Heroes in Time carries contributions from Fraser Edwards of Ascension and Jakob Svensson of Wigelius, both of them from Swedish melodic bands. No later album introduces an outside player by name, so this is the only Metalite record with guest contributors on it.
The fourth and fifth albums are one story told three years apart. AFM's 2023 press release for Expedition One sets it in 2055: in a world where health increasingly decides how a life goes, a renegade team of former intelligence and military people and breakaway tech executives, led by five commanders, plans an escape to distant planets. The 2026 announcement of Discovery places it in 2058, three years later, and says it follows what became of the people who left Earth. The end of one record is the premise of the next.
Track fourteen of Expedition One, "Utopia", is the first instrumental in the band's history. AFM's press release introduces it as exactly that, and goes on to say the album holds both the tight, familiar Metalite of "Blazing Skies", "Aurora" and "Free" and the unexpected "Sanctum Of Light", "Outer Worlds" and "Paradise". One reading is that carrying sixteen songs through a single story is what finally made a song without a voice necessary.
What pushed the band into writing a concept album came from their audience. In AFM's press release Premberg says people kept telling them their songs sounded cinematic, so he set out to write something that would arch back over Heroes In Time, Biomechanicals and A Virtual World and tie all three together. It was awkward at first, he says, and once the shape of the story was agreed they were happy with the result. In the same announcement he notes that the band's sound had moved a long way in four or five years, the production quality above all.
The 2022 live EP was released one song at a time before it existed as a record. Four songs were taken from the band's Sweden Rock Festival set of 9 June, and AFM put out an official live video roughly every two weeks — "We Bring You The Stars" on 15 September, "Far From The Sanctuary" on 29 September, "Peacekeepers" on 13 October and "Cloud Connected" on 27 October. The EP itself, Live At Sweden Rock Festival 2022, followed on 28 October. No CD was made and there is no Japanese edition. Of the four songs, only "We Bring You the Stars" is on no album at all: it is a standalone single.
Two of the songs that never reached an album are covers of their Nordic elders. Stratovarius's "Hunting High and Low" came out as a standalone single on 8 April 2020 and Sonata Arctica's "Full Moon" on 18 March 2022, each with a music video on AFM's own channel, and neither on any album. Choosing two of the defining Finnish melodic power metal bands is also a statement about where Metalite think their own music sits.
The current drummer joined in 2024. The band's press text says Erik Junttila Johansson came in that year and that his first gig with them was in Linköping at the beginning of 2025; their own show list gives that date as 31 January 2025, at Hell Yeah Rock Club. His predecessor Lea Larsson played through Expedition One, which makes 2026's Discovery the first studio album Junttila Johansson has made with the band.
The name is a coinage. In a 2019 interview Edwin Premberg explained that it puts "metal" together with "l33t", the internet slang respelling of "elite" that swaps digits in for letters. So the word is metal plus a piece of online orthography. Given a band whose subject matter is the near future and whose songs are built on synthesisers, the way the name was made is a fair announcement of the music.
Emma Bensing, the band's first singer, played exactly one concert with them. Premberg said in a 2019 interview that the release gig for the debut album was her only live appearance. She became a mother in 2018 and decided she wanted her time for things other than Metalite. That makes Heroes in Time the only Metalite album her voice is on: one of the two people who started the band left behind one record and one show.
The singer who replaced her had not been a metal listener. Several candidates had been tried without success when Premberg saw Erica Ohlsson performing at a rock show in Stockholm. He asked her to record a few songs in the studio and, as he put it in a 2019 interview, she had everything they had been looking for; he offered her the job there and then and she took it. By that account she had barely listened to heavy metal before. She has sung on every album from the second, Biomechanicals, onwards.
The 2019 line-up mixes old acquaintance with other bands. Guitarist Robert Örnesved had played in a covers band with Premberg fifteen years earlier and had been in Castillion. Bassist Robert Majd also fronts Captain Black Beard, and drummer Lea Larsson came from Imber. All of them were based in Stockholm, which says something about how the band was assembled: out of people who were already within reach.
The five albums have come out on three labels. The debut, Heroes in Time, was on Inner Wound Recordings in Sweden; albums two to four on AFM Records in Germany; and the fifth, Discovery, on Perception, a division of Reigning Phoenix Music. Premberg said in a 2019 interview that the move to AFM was about wider distribution. The Japanese side moved with it, going through Rubicon Music, then Marquee / Avalon, and now Ward Records.