Most of Atoma is steel. Some of it is slag, and the steel is worth it. Picture a smelter: the Gothenburg foundrymen shovelled twenty years of their own ore into one furnace, smashed the tap hole open with an iron bar and let the old metal run white into a new mould. Sweden carried the casting home. Released by Century Media on 4 November 2016, it went to number two on the Swedish albums chart in its first week, higher than any Dark Tranquillity record had climbed at home before, Character included, which had stalled at three in 2005.
Recorded through the summer of 2016, mostly at Rogue Music, the Gothenburg studio owned by keyboardist Martin Brändström, who also produced it, then mixed by David Castillo, the eleventh album from the band is the first without Martin Henriksson, a founding member who stepped off the stage in January 2016 and stayed on as the band's manager. A founder gone. The fire kept burning.
Mikael Stanne put it plainly to That Drummer Guy, in an interview transcribed by Blabbermouth on 15 October 2016: "He didn't have the motivation to keep going." So the rest of the crew shovelled harder. Niklas Sundin is the only guitarist in the credits apart from one guest solo, Anders Iwers holds the bass on his first studio album with the band, and Anders Jivarp, the drummer, has his name on the music of half the songs on the record. I have a soft spot for drummers who turn up to rehearsal with riffs, and this one turned up with half an album.
"Encircled" is the first pour and the hottest. Sundin told Decibel on 5 December 2016 that it was the fastest song the band had written in nearly twenty years, and you believe him inside a minute: aggressive riffs, keys flickering over the top like sparks off a ladle, Stanne's rasp right up front with every word still readable. The song slams down on the opening of the record like a drop forge crushing red bar. The furnace starts white hot. No mercy.
Then the alloy changes. The title track lets Stanne sing clean through the verses, pushes the synths to the front of the room and hangs a chorus on it that sticks the first time through. This is Haven territory, bright keys over a melancholy pulse, and no record by the band since Projector in 1999 had given Stanne's clean baritone this much room. It works. A singer who can hold a melody this steady earns the space.
"Forward Momentum" is the anthem, and the band knew it. Asked by Decibel in that same December interview for his favourite song on the record, Sundin named it first, "for its anthemic vibe", and its official video was shot in the far north of Sweden, near Kiruna, the iron ore town above the Arctic Circle, with former Sentenced drummer Vesa Ranta behind the camera and Harri Haataja directing. Clean singing up front, Annelie Johansson's voice under Stanne's, a hook that climbs. The furnace runs hottest when the band stops being ashamed of a tune.
This is immediate and to the point in most cases and there is a sense of urgency that I tried to connect to with the lyrics.
Mikael Stanne, interview with Decibel, 5 December 2016
The guest list is short. It is also pointed. Björn Gelotte of In Flames, the other great foundry of the same city, walks in to take the guitar solo on "Force of Hand", one Gothenburg veteran lending his hands to another's casting at the moment that casting had lost a pair. Asked the same question, Stanne named that song and "The Pitiless" as the two that stood out for him, and the label backed "The Pitiless" with an official video cut from stage and tour footage. Two songs, two strong ingots.
The furnace runs hottest when the band stops being ashamed of a tune.
The slag comes next. Twelve songs, none shorter than three and a half minutes, none much longer than four and a half, and between the opening run and the closer too many of them come out of the same mould: mid tempo, keys on top, a clean verse, a rough chorus or the other way round. Every bar is professional. Not every bar is new. A band this deep into its catalogue can melt its own back pages down and recast them cleanly, and here it mostly does, but a recast is not a discovery, and the second half of Atoma runs on that difference.
None of that sinks it. The highs here are as high as anything the band had poured since Character: "Encircled" for the fire, the title track and "Forward Momentum" for the melody, "Force of Hand" for the guest steel. Played at volume it holds together as the sound of a crew that lost a founder and refused to bank the furnace. File it beside Haven and Projector, play it for the melodies first and the speed second, and let the slag lie where it cooled. A band that lost a founder in January 2016 cast its proudest chart result before the year was out, and the proof of it is in the metal.