Alive & Dead at Södra Teatern

Tribulation recorded their first live album in a venue unaccustomed to their particular conflagration of death metal and goth. Built in 1859, the Södra Teatern is oldest theater in the band’s adopted hometown of Stockholm and requires a seated audience for performances on its main stage, where Tribulation delivered two sets separated by a brief intermission. While the second is a more traditional collection of crowd-pleasers and deep cuts from the band’s discography, the first is their 2018 album *Down Below* nearly in its entirety. “It was a bit of a gamble, because some of the songs from *Down Below* we’d never played live before,” guitarist Adam Zaars tells Apple Music. “But we decided it would be a good idea anyway. And it was, I think.” Here, Zaars highlights key tracks from both sets. **The Lament** “This is one of the songs that I feel the most connected to, personally. I think it’s because we captured the feeling that I was after when writing it, which is a very abstract idea of old, textured paper turning yellow in a crypt. We’ve never had this as an opener before, but it works. It’s got this atmospheric buildup with the guitar, and it’s a nice way of easing people into the set. It works especially well with ‘Nightbound’ coming after it.” **Nightbound** “‘The Lament’ is a song that I wrote and ‘Nightbound’ is a \[guitarist\] Jonathan \[Hultén\] song, so immediately you get both sides of Tribulation. This might actually be my favorite song from *Down Below*—it’s got this gothic kind of vibe, like Fields of the Nephilim. The first time I heard it, I was thinking about Silver Mountain, the Swedish band, because of the guitar work. It’s a combination of many different things that I highly enjoy.” **Lady Death** “It\'s probably the shortest song we’ve written in quite a while. It felt very good that we actually managed to have a song clocking in at three-something minutes, because that\'s always been a challenge for us. It\'s easier for us to write a seven-minute song than a three-minute song. It’s a rocker.” **The World** “‘The World’ is also a Jonathan song, and it almost turned out to be an instrumental. It’s one of those songs that we weren\'t quite sure that we would play live, because it\'s kind of slow and you never know if it\'s going to arouse the audience. But as it turns out, it\'s one of our favorite ones to play live. We\'re always moving around so much onstage, but ‘The World’ has become a song where we find that it\'s better to actually stand still some. I suppose it’s because of the pace of the song, but it’s also got this feeling of freedom and hope, which is maybe quite rare in a Tribulation set.” **Here Be Dragons** “This is a song that we hadn’t played live before. I see here that \[the live version\] is ten minutes, but the song itself isn’t that long. It’s a weird song. We\'re often associated with vampires, and I do understand why, but not many of our songs are about vampires. This might be the most gothic and romantic song we\'ve done to date, and I mean ‘gothic’ and ‘romantic’ in the 19th-century way of saying it. And it\'s one of the best choruses I think we have on the album.” **Trollens Brudmarsch** “This is a Swedish folk song composed by a guy called Pelle Schenell, if I’m not mistaken. This particular song is from a place called Hälsingland, and if you\'re a knower of Swedish folk music, you can hear that immediately. ‘Trollens’ is obviously ‘trolls’ and ‘Brudmarsch’ is ‘march of the bride.’ And it\'s just a beautiful song—very solemn, very sad and melancholic, I suppose. It sets the tone for any Tribulation set, I think, which is why we usually open with it nowadays.” **Melancholia** “We\'ve opened with ‘Melancholia’ for quite a while, and that\'s mainly because it\'s also a rocker—a longer one, but still a rocker. From our understanding or perception of the audience throughout the years, it\'s one of the favorites. It\'s just a very good song to open with—or not *open* with, in this case.” **Rånda** “This song is connected to Swedish folklore. ‘Rånda’ is a local name for the Lady of the Woods, where my father is from. If I\'m correct, they don\'t call her that anywhere else—but she\'s got a lot of names. There’s a folk tale about these trolls who kidnap a local gal and force her to get married. There’s a local play about this story—I’ve actually participated in this play a couple of times—and in the play there’s a party for the wedding and all of these folklore creatures show up. The Lady of the Woods is one of them.” **Strange Gateways Beckon** “This is one of those songs we can’t really scratch from any set list, I would say. After ‘Nightbound,’ this might be my second most favorite song from the latest albums. This is the opener on *The Children of the Night*, and it really sets the tone for the album with this organ intro. I just love how it constantly builds up to eventually get unleashed with the solos in the end and \[bassist\] Johannes’ \[Andersson\] vocals.” **Strains of Horror** “It\'s one of the songs we haven\'t been able to play live very often because of the heavy use of organs in it. This was the third time we played it live. The two previous times were the final shows of the *Children of the Night* era, when we invited a friend of ours called Sofia Rydahl to \[play organ\]. So we invited her to join us again, and I\'m really glad she did. The song itself is a Jonathan song, and it\'s very much inspired by Italian horror movie soundtracks, especially from the composer Fabio Frizzi. It fit perfectly as an ender, I think.”