It’s been a long time coming, but At The Gates are finally back with their first album in 19 years! Entitled At War With Reality, it’s pretty much what you would expect from the band – and this is both a good and a bad thing.
The impact that At The Gates has made on the death metal genre is massive and can’t be ignored, with countless bands trying to emulate what At The Gates have done in the past, and At War With Reality does sound almost like it’s all been done before. At The Gates are masters at creating face-melting death metal but after so long without any new music from them, it feels like they need to do more.
However saying that, there are some absolute monsters of tracks on the album. Heroes And Tombs is an atmospheric piece that slowly morphs into a powerfully hard-hitting piece, and The Head Of The Hydra is a marvellously noisy piece that will surely go down an absolute storm live – it’s simply asking for you to bang your head along to!
This will no-doubt appeal to both hardcore At The Gates fans and death metal fans alike, but it is a shame that the band has took a very safe route rather than try something a little more adventurous.
6/10
100 years from now people will read this review and laugh at how wrong you were.