Death and the Labyrinth — The Comeback Blast — Adrian Erlandsson (At the Gates) Drum Lick | MetalForge
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Learn the Death and the Labyrinth — The Comeback Blast drum lick by Adrian Erlandsson of At the Gates. From Death and the Labyrinth (At War with Reality (2014)). "Death and the Labyrinth" is the lead single and second track from At War with Reality (2014), the a...
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1. Adrian Erlandsson's Signature Licks — "Death and the Labyrinth" is the lead single and second track from At War with Reality (2014), the album that brought At the Gates back into the studio nineteen years after Slaughter of the Soul. Tracked at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg with returning engineer Fredrik Nordström and mixed by Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios, the song exists to answer one question immediately: could Adrian Erlandsson still deliver the D-beat-and-blast-beat vocabulary that defined the band's 90s sound, now on a completely different setup and two decades later? The track reintroduces that vocabulary at full force, alternating dense blast-beat sections with driving D-beat passages in a structure that directly echoes "Blinded by Fear" from the earlier record, but delivered through Erlandsson's matured Tama Starclassic Bubinga rig rather than the budget studio gear of 1994. The Bubinga hardwood shells give the twin 22" kick drums a denser, more focused low end than the 1995 sessions could capture, and that extra weight is audible under the song's heaviest blast passages. China cymbal accents continue to punctuate riff transitions exactly as they did on Slaughter of the Soul, but through a Sabian AAX Paragon China rather than the Zildjian A-Series of the earlier record — the same rhythmic function, delivered through more refined, professionally engineered metal. The snare, a 14" x 6.5" Bubinga-shell Starclassic drum, carries more body and depth than the dry, high-tuned crack of the original album, in keeping with Jens Bogren's fuller, more contemporary mix, while still speaking cleanly at speed through the blast sections. For drummers, "Death and the Labyrinth" is a study in continuity under pressure: reproducing a band's foundational rhythmic identity note-for-note while adapting it to a mature, professional-grade kit and a modern mix, and sustaining blast-beat and D-beat alternation with the same discipline as the 1995 original despite the nineteen-year gap since the band's last studio blast beat was tracked. Practice the blast-D-beat alternation from "Blinded by Fear" first if you have already studied it, since the two songs share a direct structural lineage, then focus on the extra low-end weight the Bubinga kit demands in the kick pattern.2. Adrian Erlandsson Profile — Alternate dense blast-beat sections with driving D-beat passages, mirroring the structural template Erlandsson established on Blinded by Fear nearly twenty years earlier Drive the twin 22" Bubinga kick drums for a denser low end than a birch or poplar shell would produce at the same velocity Mark riff transitions with a Sabian AAX Paragon China accent, carrying forward the same rhythmic function as the Zildjian China on the band's earlier records Keep the Bubinga snare speaking cleanly through fast blast sections despite its added shell depth and body compared to a thinner studio snare Lock the blast-to-D-beat transitions to the guitar riff with the same zero-hesitation discipline the band's classic-era material demands
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