ASK YOUR AVERAGE Joe about Gothenburg and they wouldn’t have much to say. It’s a Swedish city that’s home to some 500,000 people and countless examples of piercing Scandinavian architecture. Ask a metalhead about Gothenburg and they’ll hail it as the land of melodic death metal: the genre that bridged death metal’s extremities with the guitar-god flamboyance of Iron Maiden, and ultimately inspired world-conquering titans like Killswitch Engage and Trivium.
“Gothenburg is a pretty small city,” says Mikael Stanne. “And the metal community there was tiny. Everybody knew everybody else. There were two record stores where you’d
