![]() Names affiliated with the style include Tesseract, Haken, Periphery, and Vildhjarta – all connected by that very stupid name. Within a few years, these disparate technicians, united by the internet, had created their own movement: djent. By the mid-2000s, countless bedroom projects from blossoming prog-metal guitarists had fallen for Hagström and Thordendal’s playing. If he did, he’d find entire pockets of bands that have sculpted themselves around the Meshuggah methodology. Hagström doesn’t listen to contemporary heavy metal. We didn’t get exposed to whatever cool band played at the pub the other night.” And, if you’re isolated, if you’re an inquisitive and experimental person, and you meet up with other people who have the same passion, it forces its own bubble. “, there weren’t that many bands trying to do stuff that was extreme. “What was happening down in Gothenburg and Stockholm didn’t affect us at all,” remembers Hagström. Those cities were miles away though: 400 and 610, to be exact. At the dawn of the 1990s, Stockholm was home to a vibrant death-metal culture led by Entombed and Dismember, before Gothenburg refined the game-changing “melodic death metal” movement around the middle of the decade. Not only did Umeå’s savage winters keep them cooped up rehearsing, despite the town being a hotbed for young creatives, there was no metal scene at the time. If two songs reminded you of each other, they were gone.”Īccording to Hagström, the key to Meshuggah’s pioneering sound has always been isolation. We wanted the songs to have their own faces. The other guys got to say, ‘We like this song’, or, ‘We don’t like this song’. “When I wrote a song, I was totally unlimited until it was done. “From the outset, the one thing we really wanted to do was have as few filters as possible,” says Hagström. Then there’s Black Cathedral, which eschews everything except the guitar for an interlude of nonstop tremolo picking. Open-string chugs kickstart the track and are eventually joined by whispering vocals in a break from tradition for frontman Kidman. The album’s opener Broken Cog is described by Hagström as a “progressive stoner” jam. The centrepiece of Immutable is a 10-minute instrumental that shifts between ominous arpeggios to stomping groove metal to shrieking lead lines. The curveballs come in the form of songs like They Move Below. It sounds really good and there’s something to it I just love playing that guitar.” “It’s my go-to beast – what I use when I really need to be comfortable. ![]() “Out of all the M8Ms or M80Ms that I have, that one is the best,” he says. Hagström even plays his parts on his most trusted instrument: a custom Ibanez M8M with a piezo pickup and bolt-on neck. Entries from Light the Shortening Fuse to Arms of the Preposterous follow Tomas’s typically experimental lead, glueing their basslines and rhythm guitars to his polyrhythmic patterns. Listen to lead single The Abysmal Eye and you’ll be bombarded with eight-string guitar chugs, while Jens Kidman roars the house down as usual. The quintet’s 10th album is the sound of a band comfortable with their own formula yet still teasing the boundaries of what they’re capable of. Fredrik Thordendal’s creepy, atonal leadwork surfaces, Tomas’s spoken word riding it like a skeletal pony… but where’s Meshuggah’s frontman and living meme, Jens Kidman? It takes him four and a half minutes to scream into existence: a bald-headed jinn rubbed exclusively by that one bendy riff everyone tries to copy.Meshuggah’s idiosyncrasies resurface on Immutable. The bass supporting it sounds like a little man’s trapped in Dick Lövgren’s fretboard, repeatedly thwacked by Tomas Haake’s primal percussion. Immediately, Mårten Hagström’s one-note chug on Broken Cog is heavier than anything above or below this planet. It just became more Alien than Terminator: a living, breathing beast that wants to do unpleasant things to your face and internal organs. Over their next two full- lengths, Meshuggah incrementally dug into a more organic sound, never losing that mechanical, lumbering dread. obZen was the summit for onlookers, but to its creators, it was the foot of the mountain. From sounding like bargain-bin Metallica to aliens playing groove metal to redefining a genre, Meshuggah don’t stand still. ![]() ![]() Immutable: ‘Unchanging over time or unable to be changed.’ This band have done nothing but change. ![]()
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