RIP Katatonia
Two years ago, Milwaukee Metal Fest made its triumphant return to The Rave (http://www.you-phoria.com/Blog/2023/May/milwaukee-metal-fest), bringing a decidedly old-school, thrash/death-focused lineup that effectively cleared the slate for future iterations. Deemed a rousing success, it returned last year (http://www.you-phoria.com/Blog/2024/May/milwaukee-metal-fest-2024), and when the lineup dropped I just about shat my pants: two of my favorite bands of all time, Mr. Bungle and Katatonia, were on the schedule for Saturday. Even better, I landed an interview with Katatonia singer Jonas Renkse. This was gonna be great.
Back in the late ‘90s, Katatonia helped open up the gateway to extreme music for me. Not that the band was especially ‘extreme’ at that time, but they’d pioneered the death-doom genre earlier in the decade and had grown accessible enough to draw in a n00b such as myself by the time I was introduced to them. Those were some of my most life-altering days, getting to know the Katatonia catalog and exploring all the different directions that fandom could shoot me off in. The band has changed in style a ton over the years, and although I can’t say I’ve loved everything they’ve put out, every new direction felt natural, and every album had at least something of value on it. While I’ve never put much of a premium on meeting rock stars, I was beyond stoked to talk to Jonas.
I exchanged pleasantries with Katatonia’s manager once the entourage were on the grounds. “First off, no questions about Anders” was the first thing she said after “pleasure to meet you”. O…kay? “Aaaand probably nothing about Roger as well.” Um, got it!
Like nearly every metal band that has existed, Katatonia has gone through some lineup changes over the years; the only constant members have been Renkse and guitarist Anders Nyström, the two creative minds responsible for essentially all Katatonia songs. (Roger Öjersson has been Katatonia’s second guitarist since 2016; as far as I know he’s still a member.) I’d read that Anders had sat out a recent tour, but I didn’t think much of it at the time, so luckily this revelation didn’t undercut my strategy. However the realization that Nyström hadn’t come along for this event, which the band had flown to without any other North American dates on their calendar, special t-shirts for the event and all…suddenly I had questions.
But I didn’t ask them. The manager led me to their rented van, and out popped Jonas in a shirt straight out of MAGNUM, P.I. Now, I wasn’t expecting him to be decked out in bat wings and corpsepaint but I admit the full tourist look caught me off guard. I shook it off and we had a pleasant chat, although my efforts to nerd out about the 25th anniversary of TONIGHT’S DECISION, one of my favorite albums of all time, were met with somewhat of a dismissive attitude by Jonas. Huh.
I think he put something else on for the performance later that evening; I don’t actually remember. They came out about 40 minutes late and I wasn’t going to risk missing Mr. Bungle. Especially not for…this. In absolutely no sense was this performance more enjoyable than Katatonia’s first U.S. performance ever, 24 years prior, also at Metal Fest. That day, Jonas hadn’t been able to hear himself in his monitors, sang somewhat off-key for much of the performance and was clearly despondent. It was somehow fitting for this mopiest of metal bands; the tragedy of their songs begat more tragedy, and they declared this the absolute low point of their career for many years afterwards.
It seems clear now that Jonas wasn’t joking when he told me that this 2024 appearance was for “revenge”. And who could blame him? Like 90% of the acts who played Metal Fest in 2000, Katatonia got screwed by the folks in charge at the time; I’m not gonna rehash all that. The band had returned to Milwaukee in the interim, but now was his chance to truly burn the bridge? The shirts for the event featured an American flag comprised entirely of orange flames. They played zero songs that existed in 2000. They played the equivalent of a middle finger to the entirety of what most would deem their classic catalog—practically a ‘fuck you’ to metal itself.
Solid move, honestly. Worthy of a Mr. Bungle warmup act when I think about it! Make a special trip out here with half your band, waltz into town in a Hawai’ian shirt, play an absolute dogshit set of music, sell a few t-shirts and kiss America goodbye. We clearly deserve it! I honestly wonder if Katatonia will ever be back.
It sure sounds like Anders won’t. A week ago, Renkse announced Nyström’s departure from the band, followed the next day by Nyström’s own statement. Between the two, it wasn’t hard at all to understand the split. Jonas wants to forget about the old shit and move forward; Anders wants to play the old shit and…probably isn’t that into the direction Katatonia have been moving for who knows how long.
Me neither. I tend to be a loyalist until the absolute last straw; look at how long I stuck it out with fucking Umphrey’s McGee like an idiot. I was all aboard for Katatonia’s transition into alt-rock, then the swing back towards heavier stuff, then the Tool worship, and then when they finally went full-bore into a less derivative, forward-looking prog-metal style. Their dub excursions throughout the teens I thought were some of the best tracks they ever created. Jonas started writing pop songs; there were a couple of brilliant bona fide tearjerkers!
This decade, however, hasn’t yielded any Katatonia songs I ever feel like listening to. CITY BURIALS (2020) got pretty great reviews; at the time I felt like it was a subpar retread of THE FALL OF HEARTS. Some of it definitely is, but listening now I’m noticing how much “Behind The Blood” and “The Winter Of Our Passing” sound like Whitesnake and hating the production overall and remembering how the ballad “Lacquer” was the only song on here that moved me in the first place. There just aren’t any memorable riffs and only a couple melodies. It’s not like I lost hope; I don’t have to love every Katatonia album, NIGHT IS THE NEW DAY (2011) also sucked, they recovered. I badly wanted to like 2023’s SKY VOID OF STARS. And those first two tracks were so promising, again throwback-ish to 2016 and even further but more guitar-heavy than anything on the previous album. Taken as a whole, though, it makes CITY BURIALS seem more exciting if only because it undeniably broke new ground for Katatonia. It’s a solid but forgettable alt-metal album.
That’s probably a major part of the rift between Jonas and Anders; they clearly don’t agree on whether to return the band to its metal roots or keep pulling away from them. We just saw this exact conflict play out with another band near and dear to many Katatonia fans’ hearts: Anathema. Only the Cavanaugh brothers did this the proper way: they ended the band and each started a new project. To my surprise, both projects put out excellent releases last year. They’ll probably fail to attract enough interest to be sustainable on their own, though, and they’ll reunite before long because musicians aren’t allowed to retire, but at least there was no sense that one half of a major creative force was claiming sole credit for its ongoing legacy.
The big difference, though, is that Jonas wrote all the songs on BOTH of Katatonia’s last two albums. In a sense he’s already had full control of the band for half a decade. Has Anders lost the will or capacity for songwriting? If so, can we blame Jonas for wanting to carry on without him? If in the coming months we discover that Anders has been sitting on a bunch of material that Jonas has vetoed or something, okay. But it seems likely to me that Anders just wants to play the old stuff.
That’s probably what most fans would want too, unless there’s a legitimate younger Katatonia fanbase who are way into the new stuff. Somehow I doubt that. Or else why’d they only play two songs from their latest album at Metal Fest? What gets the most crowd reaction at modern Katatonia shows? The GREAT COLD DISTANCE songs, that’s what. And that album did understandably bring in a ton of new fans, but that was 20 years ago. So Jonas is okay with being a nostalgia act—just as long as we go along with his delusion that 2000 is as far back as Katatonia’s history stretches? As an artist, Jonas has every right to sever ties with a past he no longer feels connected to. That’s a hard truth for a longtime fan. I don’t suffer the type of depression and self-loathing any more that helped me connect to Katatonia in the first place, either, but that doesn’t change the fact that TONIGHT’S DECISION helped me through some of my darkest days and remains the band’s creative pinnacle for me. I’d accept arguments for the albums on either side of that one too! To Jonas, though, that was all preamble apparently.
I guess history will determine who’s right. I don’t hold this against Jonas by any means, I wish him nothing but success as always. I’ll probably continue to listen to whatever music he puts out in perpetuity. I just doubt it’ll feel like Katatonia to me. It might be time to face the reality that actually it hasn’t felt like Katatonia for a while.