If you had told an In Flames fan thirty years ago that the Swedish melodic death metal band would eventually co-headline an arena the size of the Zénith, the answer might well have been: “Well, yeah. Of course.”
The remarkable part isn't that a band rooted in death metal eventually escaped the underground. It's that it took the wider public nearly three decades to catch up. This music was built for rooms this size from the beginning: harmonized twin-guitar riffs, huge melodies, pounding rhythms and songs designed to hit on a grand scale. In Flames are, in many ways, Iron Maiden for the death-metal generation.
And now they have the audience to match. Thousands of metalheads headbanging, chanting, crowd-surfing and throwing their fists into the air as songs stretching all the way back to Lunar Strain shake the Zénith. After three decades of sowing, In Flames are finally reaping on the appropriate scale. This is what heavy metal looks like when the rest of the world catches up.
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