Listened to the album a bit now, I wish I was as hyped as everyone else is about it =/
There are some real bangers though. The Needless End, Gateways and Last of Our Kind are the three really good tracks for me, especially the first two. It just feels to me personally it's to much same sounding stuff throughout the album. Plenty of melody to be found on the album, maybe I've just grown tired of that style of lead guitar playing. Like on Shadowminds and Days of the Lost, I just find it meh in the choruses etc, like I've heard it 500 times before already. I prefer tremolo riffs much more. I'm glad you old dogs like it though! It's a well written album within the genre, just personally didn't grab me as much as I'd hoped. But The Needless End for me is almost a perfect song. So I will for sure be listening to at least a couple of the songs regularly
That's understandable. And I swear I think I'm damned to always think of Anaal Nathrakh before anything else when tremolo's brought up. They're pretty fantastic though, if nothing else.
Unfortunate my friend, but I think some people are realising this kind of music just isn't to their taste anymore. At least not in the same way it used to be, and that's fine. Tastes sometimes change as we grow older. Sometimes they don't. For some the older MDM stuff from the 90s/00s is enough and they don't need more. For some of us we still do want and appreciate having more top quality music in that vein.
I still prefer metal over other genres. But I also feel that music, in general, is becoming less and less interesting.
The vast majority of music I listen to is from the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Songs I've been listening to for a really long time. In the past decade new stuff has been a trickle on top of what I already have. From an MDM perspective it feels like I already heard the pinnacle of the genre 20 years ago, so it's going to be difficult for anything new to even get close.
I've gotten way more into shoegaze, hardcore, and extreme metal as time's gone on. I still absolutely love MDM, but other things like progressive metal, nu metal, and any sort of alt metal have just fallen by the wayside for me. I think there's absolutely a place for new, incredible MDM (And even stuff like classic rock and thrash, which are also long past their glory days), but nothing really quite reaches those heights anymore. Sure, something like Parasite Inc. is good, but... The musicianship just doesn't stack up to what we got from the older bands back in their prime, and I say that as someone who hadn't even been born at that point, so take that for what you will. They still very much have the passion- Even Anders and Bjorn- but they don't have that same sort of youth, drive, or creativity that they used to. There was a hunger to do whatever they wanted (Nordstrom also helped, but you get the picture). Dark Tranquillity, Arch Enemy, and Insomnium (Maybe a few others, but I can't think of them) carried the genre in the early 2000s, sure, but nobody else really elevated the music past those influences that would be taken into the second wave of metalcore. You don't get "Zombie Inc." or "Lethe" anymore, you mainly have stuff like "Pulse of the Dead" and "Stargazer Syndrome" from modern bands and "Shadowminds", "The Reticent", "Overgivenheten", and "Spectre of Extinction" from legacy bands. There's some awesome bands out there like Thousand Eyes and Orbit Culture these days, but they're still rather different from old school melodeath. I dunno, that's just my ramblings about all of this. I don't think I know all of it as well as you guys do, seeing as how you're much more knowledgeable about the MDM scene, but I'd like to believe I have basic idea of things, if nothing else. I'm just happy that THE's carrying the torch of the classic Gothenburg sound, even if it's rather safe in that regard.
Also, I'm not sure where else I'd get to talk about them, but Blood Stain Child's pretty fucking cool too. Idolator's definitely the best album to jump into if you like the Gothenburg sound, but it's far simpler with minor trance/EDM elements to counterbalance that. They tip the scale of MDM and electronic way further towards the latter later on, so just a heads up there. Their most electronic album (Which is my least favorite album of theirs, though it's their most popular one) is produced by Ettore of Disarmonia Mundi and features both members of the band. I also have to recommend Nebularium by Disarmonia Mundi as while their first outing isn't really described as melodeath, it is to me, and therefore it's my favorite MDM album and album overall of all time. Of course, the band completely changed their lineup after it because we can't have nice things. But I guess this is me getting rather off-topic.
