Swedish d-beat band Disfear have shared “Shackled To Our Vice,” the latest single from The Last Nail, their final album with late vocalist Tomas Lindberg and late drummer Marcus Andersson. The album is out Nov. 20 through Relapse Records. “Shackled To Our Vice” surfaced around Oct. 20 and 21. Blabbermouth and Lambgoat both ran it on Oct. 20, and other outlets followed. It comes after the earlier single “Early Graves.”
Shackled To Our Vice and The Last Nail
“Shackled To Our Vice” is track six of eight on The Last Nail, and it runs 3:56 on the band’s Bandcamp page. The full tracklist:
- A Circle of Disease
- Early Graves
- Open to the Night Within
- Oblivion Bound
- The Revenant
- Shackled to Our Vice
- Cyanide
- The Last Nail in the Last Coffin on Earth
According to the label’s description, instruments were tracked at God City with Kurt Ballou and at Welfare Sounds with Per Stalberg. Magnus Lindberg mixed the album at Redmount Studios, and Soren Von Malmborg mastered it at Cosmos Mastering. The closing title track was the first song written for the record.
The Band’s Statement
In a statement carried by Blabbermouth, Disfear said the band has lost three members to cancer since its album Live the Storm:
“Struggle, pain, and loss. Since ‘Live The Storm’ we have now lost three members of our band to cancer — Henrik, Tomas, and most recently Marcus. While we lost Henrik shortly after ‘Live The Storm’, Tomas and Marcus stayed active with us and were part of our new album, ‘The Last Nail’, which we’re announcing today. Written over the past 14 years and recorded during the past three years, we’ve been actively preparing ‘The Last Nail’ over the course of the last year.”
The band said Tomas “passed over a year ago” and Marcus “only a few short weeks ago,” and that “they both wanted this record to come out as quickly as possible. Before Marcus passed, he saw a final copy of the album, and we wish to share the same joy it brought him, with you.”
Disfear also described their final session together, in April 2024: “We didn’t think of the dark stuff. These were times of laughter.” Robert Samsonovits shot the last photos of that lineup at the studio. The statement ends: “Marcus, Tomas, and Henrik, this one is for you.”
Lindberg’s Final Vocals
The label says Lindberg went to Welfare Sounds in Gothenburg in spring 2023 to make a few edits to demo vocals. Instead he re-recorded vocals for all eight tracks “simply because the creative impetus was there.” He was diagnosed with cancer later that year. The label says his lyrics at the time were already “reckoning with images of death, disease and darkness.” On the opening songs, he sings about “mechanical slaves / to systematic death.” The title track’s last lines take on consumerism: “through excess we lost all the aspects, as our lives they are shadowed by doom.”
Why It Matters Here
Lindberg is best known as the voice of At the Gates, the Gothenburg band whose melodic death metal is widely cited as an influence on the metalcore that followed, including much of the heavy music San Diego crowds grew up on. Hearing him on “Shackled To Our Vice” means hearing one of his last recorded performances, in Disfear’s d-beat style rather than At the Gates’ melodeath.
“Shackled To Our Vice” is streaming now, and The Last Nail arrives Nov. 20 via Relapse. No Disfear live plans have been announced. Lindberg’s At the Gates came up in our June 2023 explainer The Brutal Birth of Death Metal, which grouped them with Entombed and Dismember as Swedish bands that brought a buzzsaw guitar tone and melodic sensibilities to the genre.
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