Imminence were at a crossroads. After years of releasing albums and building notoriety around Europe, the Swedish quintet was finally garnering acclaim globally on the strength of their international breakthrough, 2024’s The Black. For the first time, they found themselves traversing the world, selling out shows in North America, South America, Australia, and Japan before returning to the open arms of their European audience. It was the culmination of a decade of music, yet any sense of triumph mingled with new pressures and reckonings, the band making sense of this dynamic time and emerging with their most ambitious album yet.
“Whatever happened with The Black, we knew there was only one way forward,” guitarist Harald Barrett says. “We needed to make a choice now, that if we wanted to do this we’re on the journey and need to follow through. Give it everything to use this momentum we built, and become one of the leading bands in our genre. It’s too late to back out.”
In the weeks between tours, Barrett and vocalist Eddie Berg reconvened and kept writing. With the whirlwind of their lives in that moment, they were thinking about heavy existential themes — fate, destiny, how you make meaning in the years you have on Earth. Though a greater degree of success had found Imminence, these were not simple years. Individual members faced life challenges, bassist Christian Hoijer became a parent, and original drummer Peter Hanström departed, later replaced by touring drummer Mikael Noren. “As it all became real, we thought long and hard about where we wanted to be in 20 years,” Berg recalls. “And we want to be doing this.” Soon, Berg, Barrett, Hoijer, and guitarist Alex Arnoldsson gathered to record what would become Axis Mundi, their sixth LP and first for Sumerian Records.
“Someone told us: ‘You’re such a cinematic band, you should take it to the next step and make a movie.’ You can’t just say that to a band like Imminence,” Barrett cracks. Picking up from years of world-building through the band’s album art, music videos, and onstage productions, Axis Mundi became an expansive concept album realized through work with a few key collaborators. Berg and Barrett partnered with Jakob Koc — a longtime Imminence associate responsible for all of their album covers — on an initial moodboard and premise. A story began to form, workshopped by Berg and Barrett before they sent the new music to scriptwriter Juan Felipe Zul, who began fleshing out Axis Mundi’s narrative. Finally, they brought in director Pavel Trebukhin, who began conceiving of a short film telling the album’s story through linked music videos.
At the same time all of this was happening, Berg and Barrett were hard at work writing an album that jumped off from the creative zenith of The Black and went somewhere new. “We never go into a new record talking about what it’s going to be,” Berg explains. “I felt like The Black was touching on something very dark and I wanted to dive deeper then. This record is an attempt to get out of that darkness and find your way back to the light.” Axis Mundi finds Imminence wielding all the powers they’ve cultivated over the years: Operating at the cutting edge of metalcore, Axis Mundi features their customary heaviness, led by Berg’s seamless transitions from emotive clean vocals to harsh, full-throated catharses. Berg’s violin plays a more important role than ever, amplifying the album’s cinematic quality and augmented by string arrangements from film composer Lukas Geppert, collectively furthering the band’s unique use of orchestration. The band self-produced the album outside of Malmö then recorded in Gothenburg with their engineer Henrik Udd, with additional production input from Drew Fulk.
The result is a sound fittingly sweeping and epic for the mythological premise dreamt up by Berg, Barrett, Koc, Zul, and Trebukhin. Axis Mundi and the accompanying short film follow a knight cursed to wander in immortality in search of his own death. The knight often functions as a cipher, traveling a bleak world to try and reach the Axis Mundi — the bridge between the worlds of life and death, taking inspiration from a host of folkloric traditions. Eventually, the knight reluctantly takes on a companion, a hound, who follows him as they are chased by the Shadow, a conjoined twin and evil foil for the knight brought to life when the curse was first cast upon our protagonist. Though Imminence hadn’t necessarily set out to make a concept record in a fantasy world, they needed something otherworldly, mystic, to translate the feelings they had at this juncture in their career. “We were drawn to the knight: someone with a purpose, a mission,” Barrett says. Without giving away the ending, the band found the knight to be the perfect stand-in for the themes they wanted to explore: realizing how life holds meaning because we know that it’s going to end, and that this meaning emerges from having the courage to choose who we become while we’re here.
After a prologue and introduction of sorts in “Twisting In The Wind,” Axis Mundi launches right into “The Sword That Never Bends,” which sets the protagonist out on his path. Musically, too, it’s an overture to the album. All of Imminence’s trademarks — the loud/quiet contrasts, the dichotomy between violent guitars and pensive orchestrations — are on full display, but in a song unlike anything they’ve done before. “The Sword That Never Bends” is a shape-shifting journey on an unrelenting, visceral pulse, a moment of intensity that sets the stakes for the album.
Axis Mundi’s other singles are all intended as core representations of the album both aesthetically and narratively. “Crestfallen” and “False Light” capture some of the story’s most desperate scenes, the former an ethereal plea defined by Berg’s clean vocals intertwined with a haunting string arrangement and the latter featuring Berg howling over some of the album’s most brutal arrangements. Throughout, Imminence let in new inspirations, with certain songs challenging definitions of the band and their genre. A watershed moment arrived in “If Not Now, When,” in which an earworm riff almost hints at shoegaze. Comparing it to past lightning-in-a-bottle moments like Turn The Light On’s “Infectious,” the band immediately knew it was one of their favorite Imminence songs ever.
By the end of the album, the knight’s quest has reached an inevitable conclusion, and “Exodus” offers the last word by almost becoming a condensed journey through all the stylistic territory covered across the album: Beginning in thrashing ferocity, the lyrics and Berg’s vocals reach a climactic moment of surrender, before the song cedes to an elegiac orchestral outro. “Exodus” is a final, emphatic signal of just how bold and multi-faceted Axis Mundi is. If The Black was the realization of everything Imminence had been searching for to that point, Axis Mundi opens another boundary-pushing era as the band continues to set themselves apart. “I believe we’re doing something else,” Barrett says. “It took us a long time to find it. We strike a different nerve, and it comes through on this album.”
“On past records, we’ve been chasing a feeling then building a universe around it,” Berg concludes. “On Axis Mundi, we created a universe and applied it to all aspects of Imminence. This album redefines what the band can be.”
