Melodic Death Metal Master and Edge of Sanity Frontman Dan Swanö Reveals His 10 Favorite Swedish Heavy Bands
It’s a preeeeety safe bet to say that Dan Swanö belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Swedish melodic death-metal musicians. Not only did he help engender the extreme-metal genre with his bands Edge of Sanity, Nightingale, Unicorn, Pan-Thy-Monium and about two dozen more (see for yourself), his knowledge of the musical strain is unparalleled. To put it simply, without Dan Swanö, there probably wouldn’t be melodic death metal (and all its latter-year torchbearers, like At the Gates, In Flames, Dark Tranquillity and the like).
We connected with Dan “The Man” Swanö after publishing our 20 Best Scandinavian Melodic Death Metal Bands of All Time feature in mid-December. Little did we know that posting the piece would result in a reaping of dividends like communicating and collaborating with some of the most revered musicians in the metal underground, not to mention other enthusiasts concocting their own best-of lists and sending them to The Bad Penny so we could, in turn, share them with you. (After finishing this read, check out some of the other submissions from true, authentic metal musicians like Swanö. They’re listed at the end of the article.)
Swanö was so generous in providing us with loads of memories, thoughts and commentary about how he fell in love with music, his coming-of-rage years and how he became so well-versed in Sweden’s distinct brand of metal that we will likely run a sequel story in the not-too-distant-future. (So long as you engage in the conversation with us by submitting comments, sending in your own lists and the like, that is.)
And with that, let’s hear from the immortal Dan Swanö about the bands and songs that helped make him the metal god that he became and continues to be to this day.
1. Europe
I can only remember fragments of my life without Europe in it. I was 10 years old in 1983 and had the most excellent musical upbringing from my older brothers, Dag and Ingjald. Europe was probably the first band I became a fan of that neither of my brothers had gone through a “period of worship” with. We read about them in our “bible” – the magazine Okej — and we even saw them on national television playing “Children of This Time.”
Anders Måreby, my best friend and band colleague in Ghost [an early-‘80s group, not to be confused with the contemporary Ghost], also loved them, and we would sit in his room and play their records. Together we would also listen to “The Final Countdown” in my room, on a little cassette radio I had bought from the big sister of Anders.
I still remember listening to another important radio show, Tracks, [with esteemed Swedish radio host] Kaj Kindvall … the sound of the intro would come out of the speakers, and we both knew that this must be the new Europe song that we had waited for, for so long. For some reason, I was not really as blown away as the rest of the world by it. I remember thinking that [Europe lead vocalist] Joey [Tempest] sang the chorus wrong (!!) and that I would have liked it more with another rhythm for the vocal.
Well, we saw them on the Sweden tour they did, before the whole album was out, and it was magical. Our band Ghost became a trio, with Per Runesson on bass and Anders switching from organ to guitar. And boy, did we sound like Europe — especially in the last period of Ghost’s existence. Around 1988, we even got selected for the Rock-SM [Swedish Rock Championships], the same competition that Europe had won six years earlier.
2. Candlemass
Moving forward, chronologically, I still recall hearing this song for the first time on the Swedish radio show Rockbox. The intro was mysterious and dark, and when the first riff kicked in, I was scared! And excited! What was this!? At this time, I had been introduced to the darker side of metal. But this was something different than what my metal favourites Mercyful Fate were doing. The riffs were simple and often on single strings — the kind of riffs you knew how to play when you had heard a song once. This was one of the key ingredients to the way I would write my songs for Edge of Sanity some years later.
The most Candlemass-y EOS riff can be found at the end of “Beyond the Unknown,” but traces of them surfaced throughout our entire career. I even made a cover version of this track for the Reinventing the Past album by my other project Odyssey.
3. Agony
This is another track I heard on Rockbox. I am sure I heard it the first time it was on the show (1/11/86), in demo form, since I remember other songs from that episode.
I wasn’t ready for this kind of music back then, so I probably went out and bought Stryper’s To Hell with the Devil, which was also played on that episode, instead. The second time I heard “Deadly Legacy” was on the 6th of February 1988. How the hell do I know this? Well, there is this wonderful person who has listed all the episodes here https://hardrocksradiofran80talet.wordpress.com. This webpage has helped me with many “Hmm … when did I heard this song the first time?” issues.
“Deadly Legacy” was important. You could sense that the members could really play, and every second of this track is a hook. Agony lure you in with a more traditional melodic metal intro and then thrust into double speed, with tight breaks and the hi-hat in the verse. And the twin-harmony stuff in the chorus, and the sudden shift of tempo for a more Mercyful Fate-ish solo part? Bloody. Fucking. Genius.
I was asked by the guys in Acilathem to film their opening slot for Agony in Norrköping in April 1988. I was excited not only to be with Acilathem again, since they had awoken something in me with their gig at Luciavakan 1987, but also to hear “Deadly Legacy” live!
When [Swedish thrash/grindcore band] Brëjn Dëdd happened in June 1988, this was the only thrash song I knew how to play. I remember me and [Brejn Dedd guitarist] Michael Bohlin jamming on it a bit. It later became the blueprint for what I felt that thrash metal should be, and even though my writing in that genre is very sparse, this song is my rulebook.
4. Strebers
It was 1989. In July I started my factory-slave education at ABB STAL (now Siemens). There I met [Subway Mirror bassist] Velo Rytsy, and even though we had been at the same school since like 1984, our paths had never crossed. He turned out to be quite the genius musician and an excellent guitarist and bass player. He played in a band called Chickenbrain, and they had a gig at Aluceum that I attended.
One of my first favourite bands as a kid was Ramones. I really loved their first three albums. Strangely enough, I still remember having a fit and smashing them all into bits with a hammer. A very punk move of me, I must say. I had a “thing” for destroying things I liked. I completely demolished my first tiny drum kit, and another time, let the hammer fall on my favorite toy cars in a game of playing scrapyard. Eh. Sorry.
Back to 1989. Soon thereafter, I was introduced to various bands in the genre that Chickenbrain was operating in. In Swedish, it’s called “trallpunk,” and it translates badly to very melodic punk with a vibe of folk music. When I heard this song from [Swedish punk band] Strebers, and a few of their early hits like “Makten och Härlighteten,” I just knew I could do a good job with this stuff as well. Me, Velo and Chrille and Anders (later the bassist in Edge of Sanity) formed Ulan Bator. We soon became quite famous in Finspång and scored a 7-inch deal with our first demo. We even had Edge of Sanity opening up for us at our release party! If you like melodic punk, you gotta check Strebers out, even if you don’t understand Swedish. Some other eternal classics from Strebers are “39 Steg,” “Makten och Härlighten” and “Balladen om Lilla Elsa.”
5. Entombed
My first “aha moment” with Entombed was when I saw that Hasse from Motala had the cover of their demo painted on the back of his leather jacket. I was blown away by the fact that someone would dedicate such a sacred place with a demo band. I thought they must really be something else. For some reason I never got hooked on the demo. I’m not sure exactly when it was, to be honest, but I guess it was around the time of the album release that I borrowed the LP from someone.
I remember being completely blown away. This was the deadliest-sounding death metal I had ever heard. The sound was massive as fuck, and the guitars sounded like evil ghouls from hell crawling out of my Karlsson speakers connected to the Skantic stereo. I rushed to the store and bought the CD, which I still have to this day.
Everyone was raving about this album, and I remember thinking, “Well, these guys are much older than us and have been doing it for so much longer, of course they are this good.”
And when I found out that [guitarist] Uffe [Cederlund] was the same age as [Edge of Sanity guitarist] Andreas [Axelsson] and [Edge of Sanity guitarist] Sami [Nerberg], Nicke the same age as Benny, and Alex the same age as Anders and myself, I remember thinking, “Fuck, that excuse is not gonna work. We better level up.” And we did! But it wasn’t until the Dead but Dreaming demo in 1991 that the Entombed influence was clear in the music and sound of Edge of Sanity.
We already had a cool and pretty unique sound going, so Entombed was just added as one of the bands that we could use as an inspiration for a riff or two in a song. We didn’t go full-on Entombed rip-off. I was inspired and intrigued by them. Both their more straightforward songs like “Supposed to Rot” (that we even covered live from time to time) and more progressive stuff like “Left Hand Path” spoke to me, and there are some passages on Unorthodox that owe a lot to this Entombed album, both in my own and more so in Andreas’ writing. And then there’s [2002’s] Resurrection Through Carnage with Bloodbath, of course. But that’s another story!
6. Ratata
This is quite the jump in music. But that’s who I am. I was raised on all kinds of stuff that my brothers listened to, and it was especially my 10-years-older brother Dag’s taste in music that rubbed off on me. Like any awesome big brother, Dag made me mixtapes, and sometimes his own mixtapes were in the cassette player of our parents’ car.
Through him I got to hear what to this day is the main part of my musical DNA — and it very metal-free. One day, while welding very badly at factory school, I heard a song on the radio, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. But [the DJ] never said who it was! I still remembered parts of the lyrics from the chorus, and I asked everyone and my brother, Ingjald — now a successful DJ — to give me some suggestions of artists that it could be.
I went to [musical instrument store] Musikanten and bought the latest albums by Christer Sandelin and Mauro Scocco. The song was nowhere to be found on them, but the Mauro Scocco album had some incredible songs on it, and I got hooked. I bought his first solo album [1988’s Mauro Scocco] and got even more hooked, so I went back in time and bought the albums [by his previous pop band Ratata] as well.
The first one I could find was Mellan dröm och verklighet, and when this track came on, it struck a chord with me beyond what the other, awesome songs had done. This style of music was completely new to me, and this track was the beginning of an appreciation of Mauro Scocco’s music that is still ongoing. After hearing this album, my writing for Unicorn [another Swanö project] changed completely. The mystery song suddenly appeared on an album I bought for another song. It was “Du gör vad du vill” by Franska Bönder.
7. Dissection
I had only heard a rehearsal tape of “Severed into Shreds” before Dissection entered the studio in March 1993. I was blown away, to say the least, by how much they had progressed since that track. My fave song is “Black Horizons.” even though I dig all the songs on [1993’s] The Somberlain. The songwriting on this album had a direct influence on the way I wrote the stuff for [Edge of Sanity’s 1994 album] Purgatory Afterglow. Songs like “Of Darksome Origin,” “Elegy” and “Silent” wouldn’t have existed without the inspiration from this album!
8. Opeth
I find almost all the songs on Orchid spectacular, but this one struck the loudest chord with me. No other metal band has inspired me to the degree that Opeth did. I was a bit lost at the time I heard it and didn’t quite know what to do with the metal I was “forced” to write. I was so tired of the intro/verse/bridge/chorus/intro again/verse/bridge/chorus/something/chorus framework. Opeth threw away the rulebook, and through them I found my way back to the early, less rock/pop-style-arranged death metal I wrote with Edge of Sanity and Pan-Thy-Monium — but in more extended sections, like the progressive rock I grew up on.
9. Landberk
Such an amazing track. I discovered Landberk around the time of writing [1999’s] Moontower, and the intro vibe of “In Empty Phrases” is a total tribute to the intro of “You Are.” I can’t remember who told me, but apparently Reine Fiske’s Fender amp was on the fritz and had this wonderful “broken” sound. I once told Landberk’s bass player, Stefan Dimle, that this was my favourite track of theirs, and he was happy to hear that since it was a track he wrote. Stefan was also responsible for me finding Spock’s Beard. While I was in his shop Mellotronen, looking for Marillion 12-inches or something, he put on [Spock’s Beard’s 1998 album] The Kindness of Strangers. I was instantly blown away, bought the record on the spot, soon got their two previous albums [1995’s The Light and 1996’s Beware of Darkness] and began to fan-boy hard!
10. Dag Swanö
There is no denying that the music of my brother has shaped the way I write more melodic stuff. That is why it was such a blast to recycle stuff from his early solo-career days with Nightingale. This song is something that me and Anders Måreby used to listen to a lot along with [Nightingale’s] ”I Tunnelns Färdriktning” from the Puls compilation cassette that Dag’s band Original was on, alongside legends like Surdeg and a few more. I did some guest vocals on this re-recorded version. It was such an honour!
Editor’s note: And it was such an honor for one of the most legendary figures in extreme metal, Dan Swanö, to bequeath us with so many memories, and in such detail, as he detailed his favorite Swedish metal bands and their songs. If you enjoyed this read, be sure to check out these related articles:
• 10 Best Portuguese Heavy Bands Ever, According to Portugal’s Own Fernando Ribeiro of Moonspell
• 10 Best Swedish Heavy Bands Ever, According to Native Sons Prime Creation
• 10 Best Finnish Bands Ever, According to Natives the Feral Kids
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