Like many Swedish death-metal bands that emerged in the late ’80s, Dismember has a complicated and incestuous history. After forming in 1988 and recording a handful of demos, the group’s drummer Fred Estby and guitarist David Blomqvist split to join Carnage, another death-metal band that featured vocalist Matti Kärki and future Carcass/Arch Enemy guitarist Michael Amott. When Carnage fizzled out in 1991, Estby, Blomqvist, and Kärki reteamed with former Dismember vocalist Robert Sennebäck (who switched to guitar) to re-form Dismember and enlisted Richard Cabeza to play bass. Dismember’s 1991 full-length debut, Like An Everflowing Stream, has long been considered a classic of the genre. But the most astonishing part is that almost all of the members were teenagers when it was recorded. “Everyone was calling us kids,” Estby tells Apple Music. “In our heads, we thought we were a little bit older and more grown up than we were. It’s charming to be able to make a good album at that age, but I think it’s because we lived that music then. We rehearsed five nights a week and wrote songs like there was no time left.” Below, he discusses each track. “Override of the Overture” “I’m pretty happy with that opening riff, I have to say. I actually wrote that. Back then, we shared a rehearsal space with Entombed in Stockholm. They used to rehearse after us, and sometimes I would stay back just to listen to their rehearsals. [Entombed guitarist] Alex [Hellid] had a spare guitar sitting there, so I grabbed it and went out to the cafeteria room and just wrote that riff. The day after, I showed it to the other guys, and we built the song from there.” “Soon to Be Dead” “That one is actually Matti. He’s kind of funny because he writes some riffs and says, ‘Here, I got an idea. Do whatever you want with it.’ Sometimes it’s spot-on, or sometimes you just have to fine-tune it a little bit. But I remember him showing us that one, and I immediately thought it was fucking awesome. He had the lyrics already, so it was put together pretty quickly. I remember our PR guy from Nuclear Blast heard it and said, ‘This is exactly what we want!’ Then he called the head of Nuclear Blast and played it for him over the phone.” “Bleed for Me” “Here we have Matti again. He had this kind of slow-paced but D-beat kind of riff that he showed to us. Me and David connected to it pretty quickly because we felt it was good to have a different kind of tempo than the other songs. I remember being really happy with how this one came out.” “And So Is Life” “That was one of the later songs we put together for the album. Atheist was a big influence for me when I wrote this because I felt like we needed something a little bit more…not technical, per se, but with a little bit more action going on. Because ‘Override’ is like a hit to the jaw, and then ‘Bleed for Me’ is more complicated but maybe a little bit more rock in its arrangement. With ‘And So Is Life,’ I had the urge to get a little more intense with the arrangement.” “Dismembered” “When Carnage fizzled out, me, Matti, and David went back to using the name Dismember. This was the first song we wrote as a trio. But it’s funny because Matti had a friend called Marco, who made the opening riffs but on a keyboard. He said we could have it, so we played it with guitars and drums. It’s the first song on the Reborn in Blasphemy demo, and it was actually the song that got us signed and made people interested in the band.” “Skin Her Alive” “The whole song is very Slayer-esque. I was very influenced by Slayer in the early days when it came to songwriting. I still am, I guess. But the lyrics come from Matti, who had this experience when he lived with his mom. He came home one day after school, and his apartment building was sealed off and there were cops everywhere. Their downstairs neighbor had killed his wife, probably while Matti was sleeping the night before. In Sweden, back then, that didn’t happen very often. Matti had a lot of emotions about this, so he was wondering what was in this guy’s mind when he did this.” “Sickening Art” “This one was pretty easy. Me, Matti, and David wrote this in an afternoon, I think. I know Matti was reading a lot about serial killers and stuff, especially Ed Gein. So, the song is more or less about him and other freaks who kill people and store the limbs in fridges. Jeffrey Dahmer and such. But the song wrote itself, more or less.” “In Death’s Sleep” “That was the actual last song on the album. The next two were CD bonus tracks, since the CD was pretty new then and everybody wanted extra songs to promote it. But I remember I was in kind of a shitty mood when I wrote this one. I was feeling doomy and gloomy. So, I wrote the start and the end of the song first, and then we collaborated for the rest in the rehearsal space.” “Deathevocation” “This was the first song we wrote as Dismember. I must’ve been 15 or 16. We had already played a little bit together, and then we finally settled on the band name. I remember being in math class or something really boring, and that first riff just came up in my head. I panicked a little because I didn’t have a guitar, and I was like, ‘How am I going to remember this?’ So, I wrote it down in my own kind of weird Morse code. I still remember bringing that piece of paper home from class.” “Defective Decay” “I was very much into Executioner and Obituary back then, so I wanted to get some kind of groovy stuff going. I wrote the song pretty quickly, but lyrically it was probably all over the place because I was not so good at English back then. I don’t even remember the lyrics, actually, but the title—‘Defective Decay’…what the hell does that mean? I remember [label founder] Markus [Staiger] from Nuclear Blast saying, ‘This will always be my favorite Dismember song’—just because of the title.”