Stella Nomine Festival 2026 @ Entenfang

Flytjendur

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  Katatonia

  ‘Stagnation’ is not a word in the Katatonia dictionary. Since breaking through as masters of death/doom, Stockholm’s freethinkers have transcended genre, consolidating goth, shoegaze and prog into bleak, melodic songs. Now, after three decades of invention and reinvention, Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State marks another bold leap – not to mention singer, founder and lead songwriter Jonas Renkse’s most personal effort to date.

  Following the immediate anthem-making of City Burials (2020) and Sky Void of Stars (2023), Katatonia’s 13th album gets more experimental and more metal without holding back on catchiness. The dark hooks and tender vocals remain, yet the band also drive in unpredictable directions while delivering their hardest riffs in years. It’s an indelible introduction to new guitarists Nico Elgstrand and Sebastian Svalland, who replace longtime member Roger Öjersson and co-founder Anders Nyström.

  “Nightmares… is a very riff-based and very guitar-heavy album,” says Jonas. “When I was writing it, I knew that we would have a couple of new guitar players coming in. And, if you have two guitarists joining, you don’t want to present them with songs that are 60 percent keyboards. Maybe I subconsciously felt that I had to come up with some cool riffs so that they’d still want to join the band!”

  The force and fearlessness throughout Nightmares… is clear from the start of the very first track, ‘Thrice’. Thunderous chords give way to an ambient verse, before the music builds back up to a wall of open-string chugs. On ‘The Light Which I Bleed’, Nico and Sebastian lead a loose, proggy jam that ratchets into a hard-hitting doom riff. ‘Wind of No Change’ even bridges the present and Katatonia’s earliest past, bassist Niklas Sandin and drummer Daniel Moilanen laying down a goth pulse while Jonas croons “Hail Satan” in a throwback to the band’s extreme metal roots.

  “I just had this riff going, and I thought it had a bit of a heavy metal feel to it, or even a Slayer vibe,” the frontman explains. “And then I thought, maybe I should write something Satanic, because I haven’t really touched that with Katatonia since we did our first demo.”

  In the lengthy Katatonia tradition of keeping listeners on their toes, Nightmares… also packs songs which rebel against the rest of the album. The verses of ‘Departure Trails’ de-emphasise the six-string, with the ballad stacking layers of keyboards and synths to near-symphonic levels. Meanwhile, ‘Warden’ boasts one of the most pop-friendly choruses in their catalogue.

  Jonas calls his band’s ongoing rejection of musical rules “subconscious”. He adds, “Touring is great, but it gets tedious if you play the same old style of songs all the time. You want to change it up in some way, and I think it’s the same with the records.”

  In October 2024, Katatonia holed up in a converted church in rural Sweden owned by Tore Stjerna (Mayhem, Watain, Tribulation) to track drums, then recorded the rest of the instruments in their own studio in Stockholm. All the while, Jonas was getting closer and closer to his 50th birthday and found himself in a reflective mood. “I’ve been like that for the last couple of years, especially last year,” he admits. “50, it’s a big number, and I’ve been doing this for so long now.”

  That introspection manifests across this new set of songs. After coming up with the album’s title, Jonas penned ‘In the Event Of’: the climactic finale narrates a nightmare he had more than 10 years ago, with a soundtrack of ominous synths and sorrowful chords. The artwork of Nightmares… is a direct illustration of those lyrics.

  “It was supposed to be day, but it was super dark,” Jonas remembers of his haunting dream. “Looking at the sky, you could see flashes of fire behind dark clouds. And there were chains coming from the sky. The last line of the song is, ‘Mothers waiting in rows for the shadows of their children.’ I could see fences, a place where you would keep people captured, and mothers standing there, waiting for their children to come back.”

  Just as soul-bearing, if not more so, is lead single ‘Lilac’, which voices a desire to forget painful memories. Jonas also sings in his own language for just the second time ever during ambient piece ‘Efter Solen’, which he co-wrote with Joakim Karlsson, a close friend and collaborator in synth-rock project Korda.

  He reveals, “It’s the first song we ever worked on together, and it wasn’t done. While I was writing this album, Joakim was on to me, saying, ‘We should finish that song! I want it finished because it’s so good.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but maybe we should use it on the new Katatonia album.’ When I was finishing the song, I was so used to hearing it in Swedish that I had to write the rest of the lyrics like that.”

  Now more than a dozen albums deep into a 30-year-plus career, Katatonia’s well of inspiration still hasn’t run dry. If anything, Nightmares… is one of the bravest and most vulnerable releases to bear their name. And, going forward, the band’s confidence will only continue to grow, thanks to the new blood in their ranks.

  “This is a great place to be in,” Jonas says of the Katatonia of 2025. “Inspiration-wise, it’s so good to be surrounded with people that come in with energy and ideas and a strong will to take part, to take the band further. I want people to feel at home in this band and feel like we’re making a difference together.”

  – Matt Mills, March 2025

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  Antimatter

  Antimatter, a UK dark rock band, is the solo project of longtime founding member Mick Moss. The project was originally a duo composed of founding member Duncan Patterson (former bassist/songwriter of Anathema) and Moss, being essentially an amalgamation of two solo projects working in tandem with each other, with each member writing and arranging their songs alone and compiling them in the studio later on to create an album. In this manner, the pair released three albums together, Saviour, Lights Out and Planetary Confinement, after which Patterson left, in 2005, to start another band. Moss continued Antimatter as an extension of his own timeline established throughout the first three discs, releasing the project's fourth album Leaving Eden in 2007. Moss followed with 'Live@An Club', (released on his own label Music in Stone), Alternative Matter, Fear of a Unique Identity, The Judas Table, "Too Late", Welcome To The Machine, Live Between The Earth & Clouds, and, most recently, Black Market Enlightenment in 2018.

  Describing Antimatter's sound for an article in The Krakow Post in 2016, late U.S. journalist Dewey Gurall said "while the early albums had more of a triphop vibe with lots of female vocals (think Portishead or Zero 7), nowadays that type of electronic ambience and rhythm are more integrated with art rock, prog, metal, folk, shoegazer, a dash of classic British pop, and even grunge, all while never wandering too far from that darkwave sensibility mentioned earlier. The lead vocals are handled completely, and masterfully, by Mick. On paper, the mix of different genre might sound like it wouldn’t work, maybe even like a bit of a mess. Instead, from so many different elements, Moss has constructed something both wholly original and emotionally moving".

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  Funker Vogt
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  Then Comes Silence

  The group is originally based in Stockholm, Sweden and was formed in 2012. At first, the sound was wild and noisy with a distinct influence of deep psych-rock and dark shoegaze. With the third album 'Nyctophilian' (2015), Then Comes Silence gained a reputation for their live performances. It began to spread among Gothic, Darkwave and post punk communities all over the world. The group signed for Nuclear Blast in 2016 and recorded 'Blood' which came out in 2017. During 2017 and 2019 the band toured frequently around Europe, opening for bands like Fields of the Nephilim and The Chameleons, and have performed at M'era Luna, Wave Gotik Treffen, W-Fest, Roskilde Festival and A Murder Of Crows Festival. Then Comes Silence have recently signed a dual deal with Metropolis Records for North America and Nexilis/Schubert Music for the rest of the world. In August 2022 the band did their first US tour opening up for The Bellwether Syndicate playing in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boise, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Chicago and New York City among others. The new album 'Hunger' was launched on July 1, 2022.
• 

  Ductape

  Sound of then, now and what’s to come.

• Corlyx
• 

  Night in Athens

  raw analogue dark synth
• 

  Golden Apes

  offical { GOLDEN APES } facebook

  www.goldenapes.com

• Funkervogt
• WORLD, INTERRUPTED