Leaving aside all the abject horrors of the real world, yesterday was the raddest: MLB Opening Day! Also? Giancarlo crushed two taters in his first game with The Best Team! Also? Super-fun ep of Drag Race! And what else? At some point during all that sickness, I landed an advance of At The Gates’ upcoming LP, To Drink From The Night Itself. (!!!)

Every time I talk about ATG, I kinda say the same stuff, because superlatives don’t really allow for much variety. I have like 10 favorite bands, and At The Gates are one of them. At The Gates are my FAVORITE-EST one of them (depending on the day). I haven’t even finished a full spin of TDFTNI, but I’m crazy-hyped on what I’ve sampled. I wrote about the album’s lead single/title track at the beginning of March, and now as the month draws to a finish and the year starts heating up, they drop another. In like a lion, out like a lion, motherfuckers.

Single #2 is called “A Stare Bound In Stone.” The title sounds like an ATG title, and the tune backs it up. As I was saying about Single #1, the production this time around sounds gnarlier than it did on the band’s last LP, 2014’s At War With Reality. I loved AWWR, and I wouldn’t change a thing about it, but I do prefer my Swedish melodic death metal with a crustier edge, and I’m getting that here. Along with everything-the-fuck else: slams + grooves + riffs + hooks + leads + shifts + jolts + Tompa Lindberg’s napalm-torch vocals. This is how you do it.

A while back, I mentioned how the cover of TDFTNI is the best art I’ve ever seen from At The Gates — by orders of magnitude — but the “video” for “A Stare Bound In Stone” is an ill-advised 180 and unwelcome return to their eyesore early days, specifically the sleeve of 1992 debut album The Red In The Sky Is Ours. Truly, indefensibly, inexplicably shitty. I’m so happy At The Gates are back, man. Blast this.

To Drink From The Night Itself is out 5/18 via Century Media.