From the moment that this release was announced I was very eager to see what the beloved Swedes would achieve considering that their last two albums, in my opinion, were quite mediocre. Besides that, there were some line-up changes once again. At first, Anders Iwers (Ceremonial Oath, Tiamat, ex-In Flames, ex-Cemetary) became their new bass player. After that, the founding member and guitarist/bass player Martin Henriksson decided to leave the band after 27 years because he lost his interesting in music. Since then, the spot of the second guitar player is empty and DT will perform live with session member.
But when the first promo videos came out, those worries became to fade away and were completely vanished after “Atoma” came out of my speakers. And that’s because this is a really good album. Everything that we love in the DT sound is here once again. The charismatic voice of Mikael Stanne, the excellent leads and melodies from Niklas Sundin and of course the keyboards of Martin Brandstrom, who is also the producer of this album, that give something special in their songs. The atmosphere of this record took me back to the era of “Damage Done/Character” and has great tunes such as “Force Of Hand”, “Atoma”, “Forward Momentum”, “Clearing Skies” and I’ll stop here because I will write them all down. It has great flow, doesn’t get boring and the first thing that comes to your mind after you listen to it once is to hit replay. This album somehow closes a year with very good melodic death metal records from top bands like DevilDriver, Omnium Gatherum, Insomnium, In Mourning and Be’lakor.
It is available in CD, vinyl and all of you who will seek its limited edition will find a second CD with two very different songs with ambient elements and only clean vocals. Also, many fans these days continue to compare DT with In Flames every time the two of them release a new album. All I have to say is that this is meaningless, because on one hand we have a top-class band and on the other a bad joke.
