walking upstream…
In Flames
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photo: cato edvardsen · cc by 2.5 ↗In Flames
sourcesRockdetector — "Come Clarity" · Live-Metal.net — "A moment of 'Clarity' with In Flames" (2006) (Gelotte naming Rainbow, Ritchie Blackmore and Ronnie James Dio as his formative influence) · Metal Underground — In Flames interview (2005) (Gelotte corroborating his Rainbow/Dio background) · Enslain Magazine — Interview with Jesper Strömblad (1999) (Strömblad's Ceremonial Oath and violin-to-guitar backstory) · Wikipedia
In 1990, Jesper Strömblad was the bassist in the Gothenburg death metal band Ceremonial Oath, playing what he later called "regular brutal death" with no room for the melodic ideas in his head. He'd started on violin at four and traded it for an electric guitar at twelve, and he wanted a project that let both instincts through — one built specifically to graft Iron Maiden's melodic twin-guitar writing onto death metal's weight. At the time, he said, "I hadn't heard any band that did that." Guitarist Björn Gelotte joined as a drummer, and singer Anders Fridén arrived in time for 1996's The Jester Race; together they helped found the Gothenburg melodic death metal sound. In Flames' catalogue has since drifted toward cleaner, more commercial metal, but its melodic backbone still traces to a violinist who picked up a guitar and heard Iron Maiden doing what he wanted to do.
the sound in question
2002
Cloud ConnectedIn Flames
walk the tributaries ↓
Iron Maiden1980s · Heavy metal / Hard rock / New wave of British heavy metal
When Metal Update asked what shaped In Flames' sound in 1999, founder Jesper Strömblad didn't hedge: "I think Iron Maiden's style of guitar playing." He built the whole project around exactly that idea — melodic twin-guitar writing grafted onto death metal's weight. Bassist Peter Iwers, who joined in 1997, names Maiden as the reason he picked up an instrument at all, calling them "probably the one band that made me want me to start playing music" in a 2006 interview. Two members, a decade apart, landing on the same band as the origin point.
listen: upstream & heresource: Metal Update — Interview with Jesper Strömblad (1999) (Strömblad naming Iron Maiden's guitar style as In Flames' formative influence) ↗
1983
The TrooperIron Maiden
1996
MoonshieldIn Flames
listen forGuitarist Björn Gelotte put the mechanism plainly in 2006: "we sort of took what they did and mixed it with folk music and death metal." Hear the shape both songs share — "The Trooper" opens on a clean, harmonized two-guitar melody that keeps resurfacing through the song rather than sitting inside one solo, and "Moonshield" borrows that structure outright, its own harmonized lead threading through the verses as connective tissue before the riffing turns heavier underneath it.
Rainbow1970s · Hard rock / Heavy metal
Gelotte's own formative influence sits outside the metal canon the band gets filed under. "My dad's a metalhead, so I grew up with Dio, Rainbow, Sabbath," he told Live-Metal.net in 2006, naming guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and singer Ronnie James Dio's mid-1970s band specifically: "Ritchie Blackmore and Ronnie James Dio are the ones that definitely inspired me to start playing music." It's a different lineage than founder Jesper Strömblad's — Gelotte calls his own playing "more blues-based," descended from Rainbow and Deep Purple rather than Maiden's melodic guitar-writing.
listen: upstream & heresource: Metal Pigeon — In Flames interview (2006) (Gelotte on the Iron Maiden guitar-harmony influence and his own Rainbow/blues-rock background) ↗
1975
Man on the Silver MountainRainbow
2006
Take This LifeIn Flames
listen forRitchie Blackmore "was one of my favourites and as a songwriter he's written some of the coolest riffs in the world," Gelotte said in 2006, the same year Come Clarity brought guitar solos back into In Flames' sound after a stretch where they'd mostly disappeared. Play "Man on the Silver Mountain" against "Take This Life" and hear the same architecture: a heavy, riff-driven verse built as scaffolding for a soaring, blues-inflected guitar solo, the vocal dropping out to let the guitar carry the song's most melodic moment.