onas Renkse was an outdoorsy child who started playing football and handball at age seven. He was, by his own admission, pretty good. But by age 14, metal had taken over. “The music thing felt so enormous compared to the sports,” he remembers. “It was a totally different universe and it devoured me.”
It’s been 30 years since Jonas and co-founding guitarist Anders Nyström released Katatonia’s debut album, Dance Of December Souls. The band’s sound has progressively softened from the harsh death metal that emulated their heroes in Morbid Angel to stately gothic metal, and they’ve constructed their own universe – asort of Swedish version of Gotham, a gloomy cityscape populated by ominous birds, a place to contemplate themes of death, despair, heartache, and – whisper it – sometimes hope.
“In music you can find more of yourself, I think,” Jonas continues, speaking to us via Skype. He’s on tour, and outside the Hawthorne Theatre in Portland, Oregon. It’s a former Masonic lodge turned rock club they’ve played three times previously – and, in typical Katatonia fashion, it’s raining. “You can also find solace, you can find creativity, so it suited me very well. I was doing graffiti, also, which wasn’t very
