Photo by Linda Florin
Back in 1998, thrash metal was in a strange place. Some might say it was moribund, if not outright dead. Metallica had released Load in 1996 and Reload in 1997, two albums that divided their fanbase (to put it mildly). Slayer flirted with nu metal on Diabolus in Musica. Megadeth were poised to release Risk, their most FM Rock-friendly album yet.
By contrast, other branches of extreme metal had been flourishing, propelled by a host of Scandinavian bands, from Entombed to Emperor. When Gothenburg's At The Gates split, following 1995’s epochal Slaughter of the Soul, drummer Adrian Erlandsson joined forces with guitarist Patrik Jensen to form The Haunted. Soon they were joined by ATG's core songwriting team – the Björler twins, Jonas (bass) and Anders (guitar) – along with vocalist Peter Dolving.
Looking back, Jensen reflects that they were “a band made out of generals”. Together they created a fusion effect that produced a debut album, 1998’s The Haunted, which was nothing less than an atomic bomb dropped on the dormant thrash scene. The sheer dexterity and nimble nature of its fretwork, speed-demon drumming, and Dolving’s frenetic and unconventional vocals, presented a cleaner, razor-sharp vision of thrash. It simultaneously evolved the At The Gates sound and dispensed with it entirely. The Haunted was the band At The Gates wished they could have been.
The following year, Testament released The Gathering, and suddenly the old guard woke up from its slumber. Recruiting Dave Lombardo on drums, James Murphy on guitar and Steve DiGiorgio on bass, The Gathering’s sound had a biting swing infused with a new ferocity. The two bands later toured together in 1999.
“Thrash came back, and people just started being themselves again. If you have something good, you don't have to reinvent the wheel,” says Jensen.
On the XFM radio station in London, the Rock Show previewed songs from The Haunted’s debut album, like missiles dispatched across the North Sea. The presenter at the time, Ian Camfield, teased that The Haunted’s album was delayed by some legal issues. Jensen frowns at this when I recount it, but then remembers an old rocker from Canada who used to tour vinyl fairs telling people about the EP his band, also called The Haunted, had put out in the sixties. At one point he emailed the Swedes, making noises about suing them for trademark infringement.
This displeased drummer Per Möller Jensen, who stepped into Erlandsson’s shoes after the first album was released, before Erlandsson returned for good in 2013.
“He could be very frank,” laughs Jensen. “Let's put it this way. So he emailed that guy back: ‘Let's fucking see your fucking lawyer.’”
The Haunted were born brutal and remained brutal. I first saw them at Glasgow’s small club venue, The Cathouse, after the release of 2003’s One Kill Wonder, the band now with the imposing Marco Aro on vocals. The gig went into band legend because of the local roadie who helped them load in – “a pub brawler kind of guy”, according to Jensen, who walked up the venue stairs with two 4x12 guitar cabinets tucked under each arm like it was nothing. The Haunted thanked him by destroying that night.
On new album, Songs of Last Resort, it feels like The Haunted of One Kill Wonder is back, something Jensen sees fans commenting on, largely due to what he describes as the “aural onslaught” of the record. The album demonstrates the band’s sharpness and grasp of texture – the knowledge of when to ratchet up the tension and when to loosen its grip – with a mastery that speaks to their experience, and their upcoming thirtieth birthday as a band next year.
“I mean, it's heavy, but I would maybe say that it's more like [2004’s] rEVOLVEr,” says Jensen of the One Kill Wonder comparisons. “Maybe people don’t make the connection, because it's not Marco singing [on that album], but for me, behind the scenes – the thinking and how the songs came about – it felt more like rEVOLVEr.”
I can see what he means. Whereas One Kill Wonder is The Haunted’s most savage album, rEVOLVEr is razorsharp thrash married to groovier, even daring, explorations on songs like “Burnt to a Shell” and “Liquid Burns”.
There’s almost a wrestling tag-team dynamic with The Haunted’s vocalists over the years. Dolving sang on the debut, then Aro came in for 2000's classic The Haunted Made Me Do It and One Kill Wonder. Dolving came back for rEVOLVEr and a few more albums, before Aro returned permanently on 2014’s Exit Wounds onwards.
Aro’s a huge presence on Songs of Last Resort, and his performance speaks to the close-knit network within the Swedish heavy scene. On previous albums, Aro recorded his vocals with Jocke Skog of Clawfinger, but Skog had left Stockholm since 2017’s Strength in Numbers. The Haunted guitarist and popular metal YouTuber Ola Englund was an option, but the band decided against it.
“Having a guitar player sit there with his arms folded over his chest, going, ‘I think you can sing that better’... It doesn’t fly. Especially not with Marco,” says Jensen.
Instead, the band turned to Björn "Speed" Strid, vocalist of Soilwork. In Aro’s own words, “he called him out on his shit”, says Jensen, and extracted from him a career-best performance of the kind of unrelenting command and savagery that belies Aro’s loveable nature.
“He's a top bloke,” says Jensen. “He's a really funny guy. He contributes a lot to a great atmosphere. He might look intimidating, he might be a Finnish ex-marine and whatever, but he's a cuddly guy.”
The rest of the band laid down the instrumentals with producer Oscar Nilsson, also a professional drummer. He got a typically excellent performance from Erlandsson, whose pedigree also includes stints in Cradle of Filth and Paradise Lost. In Jensen’s opinion, Englund came up with some of his best solos ever. Then the mix by Jens Borgen (with a CV that’s a who’s-who of Scandinavian metal) topped it all off.
During the eight years since Strength in Numbers, Jensen hoped to get the band back into a rehearsal space together at various points, which for many reasons was hard to achieve. He ploughed his energy into other work, joining Softube, a company making guitar plugins. Jensen describes himself as the kind of guitar player who is led by the tonality of his instrument – he can write like the Rolling Stones, AC/DC, and even Kyuss, depending on his guitar and amp setup.
It was in 2024, with a new plugin called the Engl Savage (modelled on one of his preferred amps), that Jensen happened upon The Haunted rehearsal room sound that prompted a blaze of songwriting.
“In March through to September last year, I wrote eleven songs,” he says. “I play according to what sound I have. I had the sound from the rehearsal space. I could write like I used to. People sometimes ask me, why did you choose to go back and do the old-style songwriting? It was always there. I just didn't have the tool.”
When Jensen walks his dog, he eschews podcasts and music in favour of becoming bored. When boredom sets in, our minds start to find other ways to entertain us, and the door to creativity is opened – especially when exercise is pumping freshly oxygenated blood around. On one of these walks, a melodic riff came to Jensen which took him by surprise. He went home and recorded it, and it formed the basis of one of the album’s most arresting songs, “To Bleed Out”.
Usually, Jensen tackles the thrash and leaves the more melodic parts to Jonas Björler. But this time he ran with it. Jonas’s twin, Anders, left the band along with Dolving and Per Möller Jensen in 2012, which Jensen refers to as the “natural ebb and flow” of The Haunted’s “musical adventure (if that’s not too cheesy)”.
“Then I got to the chorus – we've never had any riff like that in The Haunted,” says Jensen of “To Bleed Out”. “It's a three-harmony guitar part. So in the band, we call it the Thin Lizzy part. I just kept on writing. This sounds good, I thought, and the other guys agreed, and we recorded it. It’s one of my favorite songs on the album, actually.”
He leaned on yet another prominent member of the nineties Swedish metal fraternity, Örjan Örnkloo of Misery Love Co., to supply synths on the song. The pair lend their talents to supergroup The Halo Effect live as well.
Elsewhere, “Death to the Crown” has all the meticulous phrasing, technical turnarounds and expressive architecture of a quintessential The Haunted song. “Hell is Wasted on the Dead” is a blaze in the northern sky with its DNA extracted from One Kill Wonder songs “Everlasting” and “Urban Predator”.
The Haunted have always explored the dark side of human nature. Album title Songs of Last Resort is a reference to the “Letters of Last Resort” handwritten by incoming British Prime Ministers to their Trident nuclear submarine commanders in the event that the UK is destroyed in an all-out nuclear attack. The letters lay out four options: retaliate; do nothing; join forces with an allied nation, such as the US; or leave it to the commander’s discretion. Jensen was struck by the image of these submarine commanders being at the bottom of the ocean and the sinking horror of not knowing whether your closest allies even exist anymore.
“‘Warhead’, the first single, it's about politicians and the industrial magnates who profit from war,” he says. “Or nationalists going on about war. They have a head of war on their shoulders.”
In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen’s recent non-fiction minute-by-minute account of what would happen if the US was attacked with a nuclear weapon by a foreign power, it is made clear how dangerous the US Launch On Warning policy truly is. All it takes is an early warning alert, be it accurate or false alarm, for all hell to break loose. Then there’s the sheer overkill of the nuclear deterrent. In 1967, the US had stockpiled a high watermark of 31,255 nuclear weapons. The 80-ton thermonuclear bomb the military tested in 1952, codename Ivy Mike, exploded with the power of 1,000 Hiroshimas and could have wiped out 10 million people if dropped in New York City or Moscow on its own.
The fear and thrill of nuclear war has long fuelled thrash metal, from Metallica’s “Fight Fire With Fire” to Power Trip’s “Armageddon Blues”. We are fully capable of bombing ourselves back to the stone age, which underlines the force of the couplet in “Warhead”: “From a stone weighed in a primal hand/To a carpet of bombs, the warhead shall remain”.
A conversation with The Haunted’s art director, Andreas Pettersson, revealed to Jensen how the band’s focus has pulled back when it comes to exploring humanity’s inherent inhumanity.
“He actually was the one that pointed out to me that the first album was personal rage, and then the second was serial killers, and then it just escalated,” says Jensen. “Strength in Numbers is about government control and the police state thing. And on the latest album it’s nuclear war. I hadn't thought about this, but it's covering the whole spectrum.”
Or maybe the wider disgust with the human race has always been there. The Haunted’s debut starts with the vicious “Hate Song” and ends with “Forensick”, which begins with an eerie spoken line – “At night I listen to the sound of the animals” – before getting right to the point: “Fuck you, mankind/You’re so ugly, so vain”.
Jensen refers to Pettersson as the band’s sixth member. An accomplished creative director with plenty of serious corporate clients, he’s always worked with The Haunted to keep his hand in something edgier. When you see their logo centred on their album covers, that’s part of his brand guidelines.
And who exactly is the silhouetted figure in the band’s logo? It’s a man modelling some jeans from a photoshoot Pettersson did many years ago. The model doesn’t know he’s had a thirty-year shelf life emblazoned on The Haunted’s album covers and merch. The story of the shoot involved asking a favour of a city’s pest control department, and explains the significance of the lick of flame on the debut album’s cover.
“They had a huge plastic bag of dead city pigeons, because you need to control them,” says Jensen. “They spread a lot of disease and stuff. So he got these bags from the city. They had a photoshoot. I'm sure this handsome guy was standing there with his jeans all looking cool. And behind them, they had poured out all these dead pigeons with gasoline on them and set them on fire.”
Jensen thinks there might have been some doves in the mix as well. It seems apt that The Haunted's logo partly emerged from the burning of an archetypal symbol of peace.
The Haunted changed a lot of things about thrash metal with a clean, classy aesthetic that matched the surgical steel of their songwriting. They embraced the inner turbulence of their lineup fluctuations as readily as they did the erratic misdeeds of the people and institutions they skewer in their lyrics. No-one and nothing is perfect, but Songs of Last Resort showcases a band that has spent years honing its craft. The Haunted is ready to launch again – consider this a warning shot.
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Songs of Last Resort, the latest album from The Haunted is now available via Century Media Records. Get the album - HERE
