Soilwork

Soilwork are Helsingborg's contribution to the Swedish melodic death metal onslaught, a band that started in late 1995 as Inferior Breed around singer Björn Strid and guitarist Peter Wichers and took its new name a year later. Soilwork, they'll tell you, means working from the ground up, and that's exactly how they built the thing.

By the time Natural Born Chaos hit in 2002 on Nuclear Blast, the lineup had filled out with Ola Frenning on guitar, Ola Flink on bass, Henry Ranta on drums and, from 2001, Sven Karlsson on keyboards, and the sound had grown teeth and a heart at once. Strid is the secret weapon: one second he's roaring like a jet engine, the next he's belting a chorus you could hum on the bus. "As We Speak" rides that whiplash, and Figure Number Five, a year later, sharpened it further with "Rejection Role" and the churning "Strangler", all machine-gun riffs, glittering synths and hooks that refuse to leave.

Drummers and guitarists have come and gone since, Dirk Verbeuren among them, and Wichers left and came back before leaving again, but Strid has never budged. Twelve studio albums on, Soilwork still sound like a band grinding its way up from the dirt.

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