Blindside

Blindside came roaring out of the southern suburbs of Stockholm, where they started in 1994 under the name Underfree before switching to Blindside two years later. Christian Lindskog does the screaming and the singing, Simon Grenehed plays guitar and adds backing vocals, Tomas Näslund is on bass and Marcus Dahlström on drums, and together they make alternative metal that lurches from whisper to howl without warning.

The self-titled debut came out on the Swedish indie Day-Glo in 1997, and A Thought Crushed My Mind followed in 2000, but the break came in 2001, when a tour with P.O.D. landed them a deal with Elektra. Silence, in 2002, was the big-league debut, heavy on churning riffs and raw nerve, with "Pitiful" and "Sleepwalking" as its twin hooks. They opened for Hoobastank in 2003, lost gear to thieves on their own headlining run in 2004 and still got About a Burning Fire out that year, anthemic and brooding, with "All of Us" leading the charge.

Then the corporate floor gave way: Elektra was folded into Atlantic and Blindside's label simply stopped existing. They went independent for The Great Depression the next year, put out the DVD Ten Years Running Blind and The Black Rose EP in 2007, then mostly went quiet until With Shivering Hearts We Wait in 2011. Singles surfaced in 2019 and 2025, and they have played Furnace Fest to packed crowds in 2022 and 2024.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.