What the Hell Happened to Orbit Culture?
If you happen to pass me walking the streets of Boise these days and don’t see that I have a tail, it’s because it’s between my legs.
In the 18 years I’ve operated this website – or blaaaag, as the peanut gallery derides it – I’ve issued a mea culpa from time to time. The specific instancess don’t come to mind at the moment, nor did they when I spent some more moments fishing around for flubs I’ve made in the past. But I admit they’re out there; after all, when you’ve published more than a thousand posts on a website, not to mention thousands more articles for magazines and other media outlets, there are bound to be some regrets.
But it appears my biggest misjudgment of all time on The Bad Penny has arrived and its name is Orbit Culture. Haven’t heard of them? Lucky for you, at least as far as their present attitude is concerned. As a sucker for Swedish melodic death metal, I glommed on to the band led by reliably downcast – neigh, ever-frowning, and even perpetually peeved – vocalist and rhythm guitarist Niklas Karlsson.
While founded in 2013, Orbit Culture won me over with their fourth record, Descent, released nine years later. The alarm bells should’ve rung out then; after all, At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity, Amon Amarth, The Haunted – and, yes, In Flames – had shared bills with Orbit Culture, but conspicuously, that band rarely if ever cropped up in the many interviews I conducted with Sweden’s metal heavyweights.
Red flag number was hoisted when I interviewed Karlsson in early 2024. Anyone familiar with Swedish melodeath musicians knows that they are, almost to a fault, generally the sweetest guys in metal (or any music genre, for that matter). Karlsson was an exception and did not match that description in the slightest. I broke the conversation into three articles for multiple magazines (here, here and here), and throughout our talk, he didn’t smile or – if one were to be generous – “break character” by being a kind and down-to-earth dude grateful that Orbit Culture had begun to ascend into the atmosphere popularity-wise.
Nevertheless, it was easy to buy into the ruse, given Karlsson’s masterful metal songcraft. We are you not to get hooked by some of these Orbit Culture songs:
Bear in mind that all those tunes and accompanying videos came out in the past four years. Meanwhile, just four days ago, Orbit Culture jumped the shark with a new video that can be best summed up in three letters: WTF. Witness for yourself the megalomaniacal, tone-deaf and – most damning of all – cheesy-in-an-’80s-Extreme-playing-acoustic-guitars sorta-way that this self-important, self-indulgent, pretentious exercise in pompousness absolutely shatters what the band had built up its career to be:
Look, just because someone is talented at making music doesn’t necessarily mean that they are equally adept at all other aspects of life. Which begs the question: Why did Orbit Culture’s management, PR team, label and the like sign off on this unintentional parody of a metal song starring a band that could have – and now probably never will – reach the great heights that seemed likely they would have achieved had they chosen not to abandon the values and qualities that made them a melodeth force to be reckoned with?
Perhaps someday – when Orbit Culture find themselves in the same bowels of a Port-a-Potty as Stryper, W.A.S.P. and Winger – we’ll learn what went wrong and how a band that was about to break through after a dozen years of hard work, laborious songwriting and tireless concerts wound up shitting the bed. Till then, we’ll be instinctually cringing at what preposterous presentations and performances Orbit Culture come up with next.
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