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After 34 years of quietly going about their business, Katatonia finally succumbed to the lure of drama earlier this year, when co-founding guitarist Anders Nyström announced his departure.
A respectful but melancholy announcement by the band was followed by a slightly terse statement from Nyström, in which he bemoaned singer and decades-long songwriting partner Jonas Renkse’s reluctance to revisit earlier, heavier parts of their catalogue in the live arena. “That door has been kept shut,” he mused, “and left everything we did pre-millennium in a void.”
Old-school fans may see his point: their ongoing evolution has nudged 90s records like the bleak and doom-laden Brave Murder Day and the icily gothic Discouraged Ones out of the picture.
But as great as it would be to hear songs such as Nerve and Murder in their live sets, the truth is that Katatonia have built a second, much larger fanbase over the last two decades, based almost entirely on the music they’ve made this century, with 2001’s Last Fair Deal Gone Down – and its breakthrough single Teargas, in particular – as an unofficial starting point. The tension between progress and nostalgia is real, folks.
But beyond behind-the-scenes bickering, Katatonia remain in the rudest of health on their first album without any musical contributions from Nyström. As with 2020’s City Burials and 2023’s Sky Void Of Stars, the Swedes’ 13th album was written by Renkse alone. And while some of the dark charisma that their now-former guitarist brought to the table remains intrinsic to the overall sound, the momentum is with the singer’s shape-shifting compositions and the extraordinary melodies he weaves into them.
It begins with Thrice, an elegant encapsulation of Katatonia’s evolving sound circa 2025. A brutal fanfare erupts, vanishes, and is replaced by a delicate wash of guitars and aqueous synths, with Renkse front and centre. A steadily unfolding, dark and stealthy groove pushes the heaviness into the red, then a fabulous vocal melody emerges from the melee and winds around knotty but fluid riffing in several ingenious ways, before reaching a beautifully neat conclusion. Thrice is only five minutes long, but it contains so much.
From then on, Nightmares spirals down another fascinating rabbit hole. Katatonia have become heavier and darker over their last few albums, with an abundance of metal riffs driving the music between oases of calm, and those remain an integral component here.
Wind Of No Change is particularly brutish and grandiose, with monastic bellowing and grinding bass underpinning a cruelly pompous march into the slavering maws of something ghastly, before Renkse’s soothing voice enters to soften the blow.
Similarly, both Lilac and Temporal are heavyweight additions to the canon, although each piece is shrouded in the same ethereal haze that dominates gentler moments like the restless and fragile The Liquid Eye and certified tear-jerker Departure Trails.
The latter’s dewy-eyed yearning is almost certainly not a commentary on the end of Renkse and Nyström’s creative relationship – but it certainly stings with a plausible sense of loss and frustration: ‘I repeat my pledge at your feet / Endless days in a rat race / May this season turn...’
Their gift for the subtly anthemic collides with their equally important, noirish, cinematic sensibilities
Elsewhere, Katatonia delight in the opportunity to experiment. Warden is a sublime cacophony, with elements of post-punk and dub etched into its musty fabric. A final, deeply satisfying explosion of angular riffs and The Light Which I Bleed takes a sparse arrangement and smothers it in atmosphere, as scratchy guitar figures mutate into a big, doomy chorus and a brilliantly pompous fade-out.
The closer, In The Event Of…, is as momentous and tantalising as its title suggests as Katatonia’s gift for the subtly anthemic collides with their equally important, noirish, cinematic sensibilities.
There’s one moment that overshadows all the rest: sung in Swedish, and with a delicacy that seems startling even for Renkse, Efter Solen is a piano ballad set to a distant heartbeat rhythm. It’s also a disorientating indulgence, constructed with amorphous, ambient electronics, stuttering beats, blizzards of synths and static and a lightness of touch that borders on magical.
Like just about everything Katatonia have released in recent times, it’s beautiful, bewildering and quite unlike anything else. Bands change, people move on; but when everything Renkse and Katatonia touch turns to sparkling, fresh gold, the present and future will always outweigh the past.
Nightmares As Extensions Of The Waking State is on sale now via Napalm Records.
