Context changes everything. For melodic death metal, picturing the spawning grounds of its most successful progeny without geographical knowledge makes it easy to conjure up images of some frigid vista, deep in the frozen North. Where biting winds howl across dark chasms in the frost, split open to the sky by the staggering contests of Titans that have altered the surrounding landscape forever. The truth, however, is much more temperate – Gothenburg is a welcomingly clement port city in the south of Sweden, as warm in the summer as it is cold in the winter. Rocky archipelagos dot the many beaches along the western peninsula; travel brochure scenery that doesn’t visually telegraph “the birthplace of death metal’s measured, twisted offspring”.
Granted, the book-by-its-cover approach to scouting turns most bands into genre outliers. However, the idea that any player in the burgeoning Gothenburg-style melodeath scene came to blows to vie for territorial supremacy doesn’t stick either. The binary opposite, in fact; the formative few were wound inextricably into the fates of one another, the birth of one outfit influential or outright dependant on the other. Acquaintances and collaboration shared between the members of the pioneering acts of the early to late 2000s – DARK TRANQUILLITY, AT THE GATES, and IN FLAMES – created a symbiotic scenario, each band able to pin down a crossover in their personal histories that led them to exactly where they were when the melodeath boulder started to roll freely in the mid-90s.
Where any erratic edges were generally sanded off by the other two beyond their debuts, calling IN FLAMES as divisive as they are iconic is hardly a hot take. Even the most hardcore fans of a band could take or leave part of their entire discography, but there’s a “choose your schism” feel to their back catalogue in particular. 2011’s Sounds Of A Playground Fading was a feet-finding mission after the departure of drummer/guitarist and founding member Jesper Strömblad, that is both simultaneously derided as a beginning of an end for its lack of metal elements and praised for its broader appeal. 2006’s Come Clarity, a metalcore-focused that challenged TRIVIUM in their own backyard was both simultaneously derided as a beginning of an end for its lack of melodeath elements and praised for its skill and mastery of a new genre. 2002’s Reroute To Remain… you get the idea.
Released on April 1st, 1994 through Wrong Again Records (now reincarnated as Regain Records) and recorded at the now legendary Studio Fredman in Gothenburg, Lunar Strain generates potential rifts in slightly different circumstances. Up to this point, the Gothenburg style of melodeath was inches from boiling over. AT THE GATES’ seminal third album Terminal Spirit Disease (1994) was a scant few months away, while DARK TRANQUILLITY were six months out from their debut and gaining traction rapidly. IN FLAMES, by comparison, were a step behind. They had three recorded tracks for a 1993 demo headed by DARK TRANQUILLITY vocalist Mikael Stanne (that pinboard and red string of the Gothenburg scene rearing its head once more) and a pressing commitment to fulfil a reasonably big lie told to the record label beyond that – they’d promised thirteen songs were ready and recorded before they were signed.
It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. IN FLAMES suddenly had their platform and their first committed lineup with which to release the album that would make their mark on the Swedish metal scene. Lunar Strain certainly wasn’t all rift-inducing, either. The parts of the genre that would be seen fleshed out fully in the coming years are prescient glimpses into a near-future, plucked from a vortex in time. Opening track Behind Space is considered a fan-favourite to this day, a fully matured melodeath experience in the infancy of the scene; the huge, tempo-shifting riffs of Glenn Ljungström and session guitarist Carl Näslund are paired up with a sharp flurry of acoustic guitar in its closing moments, ticking all the correct boxes. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal influence IRON MAIDEN endowed onto proceedings breaks heavy and hard against the eardrums in Everlost (Part I), also utilising a convention of song-splitting that IN FLAMES wouldn’t repeat until 2023’s melodeath resurgence Foregone. It is a bold album, above all else – charged with youthful indulgence that grabs excitedly at the things that inspired it, while forming a faint outline of the grown-up version of itself to come.
The other side of the coin nowadays is a longer period of potential comparison to what came after. Lunar Strain and broad appeal are not bedfellows, which means much of the contentiousness makes greater sense after factoring in when the listener was introduced to the band. For anyone brought into the fold by the go-wide factor of 2011 onwards, the rawness of the sound goes against the grain. The Gothenburg scene was still fully draped in the cloaks of the death and black metal bands they had emulated or evolved from in 1994, and the dichotomy of that brutality and folksy strings in tracks like Starforsaken can be jarringly discordant.
Likewise, for anyone introduced from the Anders Fridén era of leadership, at least up to the release of Clayman in 2001, Lunar Strain is simply not the beast staring them down on introduction to IN FLAMES. It has the raw, chaotic energy debut albums share before a band finds their rhythm, but at cost; a general lack of aggression, the cohesive fury found in later releases. Two instrumentals in a ten track album was perhaps a decision made given the previous fibs told to Wrong Again Records to speed up the final wrap, but it simply isn’t the impactful album expected of such a key period when listened to today in terms of flow and consistency.
So, if Lunar Strain didn’t invent melodic death metal, nor perfect it, where does it fit into the great melodeath ecosystem as the debut of one of its most influential artists? It’s raw and unpolished, unsure of which direction to go. It’s chaos in a self-contained delivery system, a hurricane or a tidal wave, pure energy in need of direction. But context changes everything; the benefit of hindsight turns Lunar Strain into a perfect fit for the blossoming melodic death metal introduction of the early 90s. Like the hurricane of a new genre needs just the right temperatures and conditions to form, the wave needs the whole bulk moving in the right direction to become the rising tide. Lunar Strain, despite its flaws and despite its decidedly different feel to the IN FLAMES that would follow, is a rightful part of the crushing surge that would eventually roar towards the shore of metal music. Precipitating a shift in the sturdy rock of the archipelago; altering the surrounding landscape forever.
Lunar Strain was originally released on April 1st, 1994 via Wrong Again Records.
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