Where the Gloom Becomes Sound

On their fifth album, Swedish goth-metal maestros Tribulation deliver an ode to the supernatural inspired by elemental magic and mythology. Taking its title from a line in a song by German darkwave mysterios Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows, Where the Gloom Becomes Sound is a ghostly and dramatic record woven with the snaky melodies and death metal propulsion that have become Tribulation’s signature. “The title is all about the music,” guitarist Adam Zaars tells Apple Music. “And not only on this album—I would say that it describes what we've been trying to do ever since our first album.” Seven of Gloom’s ten tracks were written by recently departed guitarist Jonathan Hultén (who has since passed the torch to Joseph Tholl of VOJD); the other three by Zaars. Below, he takes us through the songs.

In Remembrance
“Out of my songs, this is the one that I feel the most connected to or pleased with because it has some kind of fresh quality to it. The main riff that goes into the verses just felt right, but I had some trouble completing the song, so I got some help from Robert Pehrsson [of Death Breath] and Joseph Tholl. And then we incorporated some Swedish lyrics, which we’ve tried to do a few times in the past, but it always comes out sounding like some kind of trollish black metal. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s not very Tribulation. This time we made it work.”

Hour of the Wolf
“This is a Jonathan song. It’s one of the more simple songs, I guess, which is always more difficult, I think. With less ingredients, you’ve got to cook them well. Jonathan said he was inspired by Roky Erickson and the Hungarian band Tormentor, especially their song ‘Elizabeth Bathory.’ Not to make it sound exactly like that, of course, but that was at least where he was starting. And I think it’s probably our most pop-rock kind of song so far. I was skeptical about it at first, but it really worked in the end and I’m really glad we recorded it.”

Leviathans
“This is a very dramatic song, and probably one of my favorites from the record. It’s also a Jonathan song. The spoken-word part is inspired by the recordings of Aleister Crowley—The Great Beast Speaks, I think it’s called—where he’s spitting out invocations. But in the song it’s Jonathan speaking. We wanted it to have that sample-like feeling, but we wanted to make it ourselves. Both this song and ‘Hour of the Wolf’ also have electronic drums on them, which is a new thing for us as well. It’s always fun to experiment with sound, and a small detail can add so much to a song.”

Dirge of a Dying Soul
“That's probably the most depressing song on the album—and I'm saying that as a very positive thing. Again, it's a Jonathan song, and I don't want to speak for him, of course, but I imagine that this is maybe the most personal song on the album—lyrically, at least. From what I hear, it seems to be inspired by the first record of Dissection, which is very cool in my book, and by classical music as well. It's one of the songs that, along with ‘Inanna,’ I really liked the first time I heard them. They sounded very inspired and kind of set the vibe for me to follow with the rest of my composing on the album.”

Lethe
“This is also a Jonathan song, and that’s him playing the piano. In the past, we used to switch around when it came to organs and pianos and synthesizers. Sometimes I would play; sometimes [vocalist/bassist] Johannes [Andersson] would play, and sometimes Jonathan. But he’s obviously been practicing a lot, so he’s been the go-to guy for piano parts on the last two records. This piece was very much inspired by Swedish folk music, and I think he would agree that it sounds almost like it came off an album called Jazz in Swedish by a guy called Jan Johansson. Wonderful, wonderful record.”

Daughter of the Djinn
“The word ‘genie’ comes from ‘djinn,’ if I’m not mistaken, but this song is not about djinns, actually. The phrase ‘Daughter of the Djinn’ comes from Aleister Crowley, and it’s referring to hashish—but it’s not a song about hashish, either. It’s really about that old saying that one man’s food is another man’s poison—and a metaphor for the idea that the world, in my opinion, is never really black or white. It’s always gray, and I think it’s important to remember that things are more complicated than they seem to be when reading the news and so on.”

Elementals
“I don’t know what Jonathan was thinking about when he wrote this song, but when we were recording it, I could only think about what we’ve labeled as ‘post-Blaze [Bayley] Iron Maiden’—albums like Brave New World and Dance of Death. There’s something there that reminds me of it, but musically I think you can hear the red thread that goes throughout the album most explicitly.”

Inanna
“Innana is a goddess that went down to her sister in the underworld, and—like every myth—there are variations of the story. But as we know it, it’s from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the very first [version], I believe. This is one of the first songs Jonathan played for us that he’d written, and it immediately felt completely right. Like ‘Dirge of a Dying Soul,’ it really set the vibe for where we were going on this album.”

Funeral Pyre
“This is the last of my songs. It’s almost a heavy metal song to some extent, and one that could have gone in many different directions. At one point, it almost turned into a 10-minute song, but Jonathan was feeling that it really wasn’t very strong, so I had to go back home and rewrite a lot of it. This turned it into a much shorter song than I imagined, and I think this was a really good thing that Jonathan did, because it turned out great, I think. That push really made it into what it is now.”

The Wilderness
“This is an interesting song—Jonathan did the music and I wrote the lyrics. When listening to the music, I really felt there was a strong sense of story—not quite a fairy tale, but something along those lines. It’s probably the longest lyrics I’ve ever written—I think there are seven verses or something. I was reading John Woodroffe’s early-20th-century English translation of the Shat-Chakra-Nirupana, which is about the chakras that became so popular in the West. Some versions of this idea say there are seven chakras in the body, so that became the metaphor for the verses.”