At The Gates’ New Single Will Rip The Throat Out of Your Friday

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If you need a track to kick off your weekend with a burst of gore and skull fragments, look no further — At The Gates are here for you. The Swedish melodeath legends revealed “Spectre of Extinction,” the first single from their upcoming new album The Nightmare of Being, late last month. Now, the band have unleashed a second track, “The Paradox,” and it picks up right where “Spectre…” left off, in that it just destroys.

Unlike At The Gates’ previous single from The Nightmare of Being, “The Paradox” doesn’t start with the same sort of dulcet, woven intro — it just blasts out of the gate and tramples all in its path. That said, while the track’s riffs are initially a little more concrete-lined than fans of the band’s infamous 1995 album Slaughter of the Soul might like, the chorus opens things up emotionally, bringing some of the melody and melancholy that has always been a part of At The Gates’ work. There’s even a little piano in there, which actually lends a bit of gothic grandeur to the whole thing (just a bit, though — don’t worry, ATG aren’t going full symphonic).

Check out “The Paradox” below:

While we’re stoked for The Nightmare of Being, At The Gates will always have Slaughter of the Soul as their career benchmark. As a guest on our metal talk show Last Words, frontman Tomas Lindberg discussed how the band came up with the style for that legendary record.

“I guess with that album, we were really disappointed with the music climate at the moment, in the metal underground,” says Tomas. “We were waiting for that album to come out, in a way, so we figured we had to do it ourselves. We went back and listened to all the records that we thought were classics, the old Judas Priest records, Dark Angel, Slayer, whatever — what makes these albums classics? How can we go around to do that? And that was the big challenge for us. We’d written all these complicated death metal records before, with a lot of riffs, and a lot of…death metal pop songs, I guess!”

Check out the full episode below:

At The Gates’ The Nightmare of Being comes out July 2nd on Century Media, and is available for preorder. Check out the full tracklisting and cover art below:

1. Spectre of Extinction
2. The Paradox
3. The Nightmare of Being
4. Garden of Cyrus
5. Touched by the White Hands of Death
6. The Fall into Time
7. Cult of Salvation
8. The Abstract Enthroned
9. Cosmic Pessimism
10. Eternal Winter of Reason
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Words by Chris Krovatin