Katatonia


Katatonia is a Swedish heavy metal band formed in Stockholm in 1991 by Jonas Renkse and Anders Nyström. The band started as a studio-only project for the duo, as an outlet for their love of death metal. Increasing popularity led them to add more band members for live performances, though outside of the band's founders, the lineup was a constantly changing, revolving door of musicians throughout the 1990s, notably including Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth for a period. After two death/doom albums, Dance of December Souls and Brave Murder Day, problems with Renkse's vocal cords coupled with new musical influences caused the band to stray away from the screamed vocals of death metal to a more traditional melodic form of progressive rock.
Katatonia released Discouraged Ones and Tonight's Decision, before settling into a more stable quintet lineup for the remainder of the 2000s. The band proceeded to release four more albums with said lineup: Last Fair Deal Gone Down, Viva Emptiness, The Great Cold Distance and Night Is the New Day, with the band slowly moving away from their traditional metal sound while adding more progressive rock sounds and influences over time. While the background lineup changes continued into the 2010s, Renkse and Nyström persisted.
The band continued on to release their ninth and tenth studio albums, respectively, Dead End Kings and The Fall of Hearts.
After touring in support of The Fall of Hearts album throughout 2017, the band went into a semi-hiatus at the beginning of 2018. Katatonia returned in February 2019 with their eleventh studio album, City Burials, proceeded by their twelfth studio album Sky Void of Stars, and thirteenth studio album Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State.

History

Formation and early years (1991–1997)

The band was formed in 1991 by Jonas Renkse and Anders Nyström as a two-piece studio-based project. Renkse would provide clean and screamed vocals and drums, while Nyström would provide bass and guitars. Renkse was the primary lyricist, while Nyström was the primary music composer.
The duo had been working together in some capacity since 1987, but properly started making music in 1991, when work started on the first release, the demo titled Jhva Elohim Meth... The Revival. The release, along with subsequent releases by the band, were of the death/doom metal sound, with the members being inspired and influenced by the rise of death metal becoming popular in Europe at the time. The release garnered the attention of a small music label, Vic Records, which re-released it as an EP in 1993, helping gain more exposure for the duo.
The newfound popularity found them recruiting a bass guitarist, Guillaume Le Huche, so the trio could play live performances and return to the studio to record a debut full-length album. The resulting work, Dance of December Souls, was released in late 1993. The album's bleak melancholy and despair of their sound continued to give them the classification of death-doom.
After touring in support of the album, the trio recorded an EP, For Funerals to Come..., which was released in early 1995. However, Le Huche left the band shortly after, and issues finding a replacement resulted in the band breaking up for a year, while Renkse and Nystrom worked separately on their own projects. Of note, Renkse started up a new band, October Tide, with guitarist Fredrik Norrman. After working some with Norrman on the project, Renkse decided to revive Katatonia with Norrman as the new third member.
After the year off, the band regrouped in 1996 to record and release a second studio album, Brave Murder Day. In addition to Fredrik Norrman contributing guitars to the album, the band also recruited Renkse's friend, Mikael Åkerfeldt of the band Opeth, to perform the screamed vocals, as Renkse became unable to do them himself anymore due to medical issues. The release, alongside the EP Sounds of Decay released with the same lineup the next year, were considered their last in the genre of doom/death metal, with the band starting to focus more on clean vocals in subsequent releases. To promote the album, the band recruited Mikael Oretoft to play bass and they embarked on their first European tour with progressive metal band In the Woods...

Move away from death metal (1998–1999)

While Renkse experimented with clean, melodic vocals over metal instrumentation as early as the 1994 recording of the track "Scarlet Heavens", the band did not feel ready to pursue that sort of sound at the time. However, after the band's 1997 releases, due to a desire to create more emotive and evolving music, the band decided to move in that direction. The first of said releases was an EP entitled Saw You Drown, released in early 1997, which also contained the first wide release of "Scarlet Heavens". Later in 1998, the band released their first full-album of this style, titled Discouraged Ones.
After the release, the band signed a multi-album record deal with Peaceville, which would mark the first time the band would work with a bigger label, and stay with them for the long-term. Additionally, Renkse wanted to focus further on dedicating himself to developing his clean vocals, leading him to no longer do any further drumming for the band. The band kept active, recording and releasing their fourth album, Tonight's Decision, in 1999. The sessions were difficult, with the writing alone taking Renkse and Nyström over seven months to complete. Once recording, they recruited Dan Swanö, who had helped assist the band in the past, as a sessions drummer. While the album contained no screamed vocals, the band still retained Åkerfeldt, who still assisted with vocal production on the album, as they had with Discouraged Ones.
After the release of Tonight's Decision, the band, tired of continually searching for session musicians, finally decided to put together a stable, permanent lineup. Fredrick Norrman recruited his brother, Mattias Norrman, as a bassist and Daniel Liljekvist joined the band as the drummer.

Stable lineup and international growth (2000–2009)

With the band finally achieving a stable lineup with Renkse, Nystrom, the Norrman brothers and Liljekvist, the band began work on their fifth album, the first of four albums the quintet would release over the course of the next decade. While personnel issues no longer plagued the band, recording sessions were still difficult, this time due to financial constraints, which limited how much time they could spend in the studio. The band worked on recording the album off and on from April to December 2000, and while the stopping and starting proved to be troublesome, it also kept them re-evaluating and reworking their material in the downtime, something they felt ultimately helped the shaping of the album. The resulting album, Last Fair Deal Gone Down was released in May 2001, and marked the band further distancing itself from traditional heavy metal music, in favor of more of a hard rock sound. The band decided to release the Teargas EP shortly prior to the album release, essentially as a single, containing the album track "Teargas" and two B-sides. Another EP of music from the same sessions, Tonight's Music, was also released shortly after the album. The band rounded out the year with a European tour with Åkerfeldt's band Opeth, with Renkse and Nystrom even providing guest vocals at some Opeth shows when Åkerfeldt was experiencing trouble with his vocal cords.
By mid-2002, the band had started to write material for their sixth album, and by October 2002, they had entered the studio to begin formal recording sessions. In April 2003, the band released the resulting album, Viva Emptiness. The album was promoted by the release of the single "Ghost of the Sun" and the similarly named Ghost of the Spring tour. The tour, which went through Europe with support act Daylight Dies, went as planned, though the band later had to cancel a June performance in Germany due to sickness, and had July festival appearances cancelled due to issues beyond their control with third party organizers. Still, the album was a success, being their first to chart on any official charts, peaking at no. 17 on the Finnish charts. File:Katatonia - Kuopio Rockcock 06.JPG|left|thumb|Katatonia in Kuopio at Rockcock-musicfestival, 2008
The band continued to spend much of 2003 and 2004 touring in support of the album. The band started writing for their seventh studio album as early as October 2004, and spent six months of 2005 in the studio recording the album, while taking breaks for further touring. The band's only releases during the time period was two compilation album releases: Brave Yester Days, a collection of songs from their death metal era in the mid-1990s, and The Black Sessions, a collection of songs from after they moved away from death metal. While initially planning on releasing the album by the end of 2005, recording sessions went late into 2005, pushing its release into 2006. The album, entitled The Great Cold Distance, released in March 2006, along with the accompanying singles "My Twin" and "Deliberation".
The band again turned to touring, most notably their live performance at Summer Breeze Open Air in 2006 being used for the release of a live album titled Live Consternation in 2007. Additionally, the band's first full North American tour, with Daylight Dies and Moonspell, ran through October and November 2006. The band continued to tour into 2007, focusing on Europe in the first half of the year, and returning to North America, even Mexico, in the latter half of the year.
With focusing on touring in support of The Great Cold Distance for most of 2006 and 2007, the band turned their focus to working on a new album in early 2008. By mid-2008, the band had booked studio time twice, but cancelled both times, not satisfied with the material accumulated to record each time. Writer's block, largely stemming from the band feeling pressure to release a follow-up that could measure up to The Great Cold Distance, was main reason for the slow progress, as the album had been their biggest success, critically and financially, at the time. Renkse and Nystrom also had difficulty deciding in what direction the album's sound would move into, eventually deciding to move the band into a more progressive rock sound. Progress continued to be slow, with the band continuing to write into 2009, but not entering the studio until mid-2009. The band continued to tour intermittently as well, including a short tour supporting Porcupine Tree in Europe. After over three and a half years, the band finally released their eighth studio album, in November 2009, under the title Night Is the New Day, including the single "Day and Then the Shade" a month prior. The time spent on the album paid off, with it being generally well received by critics. PopMatters deemed the album the second best metal album of 2009.