In Flames – Foregone

Album Review

Band [FRAMED]

Few bands carry their own history around quite like In Flames.

The Gothenburg veterans helped define melodic death metal in the nineties, then spent much of the following decades deliberately moving away from the boundaries of the genre they helped create. That evolution gave In Flames a remarkably broad catalogue, but also divided listeners into camps. For every fan embracing the melodies and accessibility of their later work, another was still waiting for those twin guitars to cut through again.

Foregone feels like the point where In Flames stopped choosing between those worlds.

Released in 2023 as their fourteenth studio album, it doesn’t attempt to recreate The Jester Race, Colony or Clayman. Instead, the band pulls some of the aggression and guitar work of those records forward and combines it with the hooks, clean vocals and modern production that have become equally important parts of their identity.

Calling it a return to the old In Flames is too easy.

This sounds more like the different versions of In Flames finally agreeing to share the same record.

The Album

Before the distortion arrives, The Beginning Of All Things That Will End opens Foregone with acoustic guitar. It is a short instrumental introduction, almost deliberately misleading considering what follows.

Then State Of Slow Decay hits.

If there was one song capable of immediately waking up listeners who had been waiting for a heavier In Flames, this was it. Fast riffs, sharp melodic guitar lines and Anders Fridén’s harsh vocals dominate the track, while the chorus provides just enough melody without interrupting its momentum.

It establishes one of Foregone‘s biggest strengths. The heaviness isn’t treated as a nostalgic gimmick.

Meet Your Maker pushes that balance further. Björn Gelotte’s guitar work carries the melodic identity that has always made In Flames recognizable, while Fridén moves between aggression and a large clean chorus. It sounds unmistakably contemporary, but the underlying guitar language reaches much deeper into the band’s catalogue.

That combination continues with Bleeding Out, although here the balance shifts toward melody. The chorus is immediate and accessible, but there is still enough weight underneath it to prevent the song from drifting completely into the band’s alternative-metal side.

Then the album reaches its centrepiece.

Foregone Pt. 1 is arguably the clearest connection between present-day In Flames and the band’s melodic death metal foundations. The riffs are fast and aggressive, the guitars carry much of the song’s melodic storytelling, and Fridén spends most of it in attack mode.

Foregone Pt. 2 takes almost the opposite route.

Where the first part attacks, the second breathes. Acoustic textures and a melancholic melody open the track before it expands into one of the album’s biggest choruses. Treating these songs as two sides of the same idea works particularly well because it captures the central tension running throughout Foregone: aggression versus melody, past versus present.

In Flames don’t resolve that tension. They use it.

Pure Light Of Mind is perhaps the clearest test of that approach. It is one of the album’s softer and most openly melodic songs, placing Fridén’s clean vocals at the centre. On a record that begins with tracks like State Of Slow Decay, it could feel out of place. Instead, it reinforces the point that Foregone isn’t supposed to be a retreat into the nineties.

Then The Great Deceiver tears straight through that calm.

It’s one of the record’s most immediate tracks, combining a fast punk-like drive with melodic death metal riffing and a chorus built for a festival crowd. There is urgency here that occasionally went missing from some of the band’s previous records.

That urgency matters.

In Flames have never completely abandoned heaviness, but Foregone feels less restrained about it. The guitars aren’t simply providing texture underneath the vocals. Again and again, they become central to the songs.

In The Dark brings the modern In Flames sound back to the foreground with electronic textures and another enormous chorus. A Dialogue In B Flat Minor then moves between atmospheric passages, heavy guitars and clean melody without sounding like three different songs forced together.

The album becomes slightly less immediate in this latter stretch. After the opening run from State Of Slow Decay through the two title tracks, maintaining that level was always going to be difficult. Cynosure is strong, but doesn’t leave quite the same impact as the album’s best moments.

Still, there is very little filler.

End The Transmission closes the record with one final collision between melody and aggression. Rather than ending with an oversized cinematic statement, In Flames finish with another compact metal song. It feels appropriate for an album that spends most of its runtime concentrating on songwriting rather than spectacle.

The production plays an important role throughout. Foregone is polished and undeniably modern, but there is enough separation in the guitars for the riffs to matter. That is crucial. Melodic death metal loses something when every rough edge disappears behind a wall of production, and Foregone mostly avoids that problem.

Fridén also delivers one of the key performances of the record. His harsh vocals sound particularly vicious on songs like State Of Slow Decay, Foregone Pt. 1 and The Great Deceiver, while his clean voice carries much of the emotional weight elsewhere. That contrast has existed in In Flames for years, but here the two sides feel unusually well connected.

There is still a question hanging over the album: who exactly is Foregone for?

The answer may be its greatest achievement.

Fans of early In Flames finally get considerably more of the guitar-driven aggression they have been asking for. Listeners who came aboard during Come Clarity, A Sense Of Purpose, Sounds Of A Playground Fading or even later aren’t pushed aside to make that happen.

Instead of pretending the last twenty years never happened, In Flames use them.

That makes Foregone much more interesting than a simple “return to form.” Returning would suggest going backwards. This album sounds like a band looking across its entire history and deciding that none of it needs to be excluded.

Shortly FRAMED

Foregone doesn’t recreate the In Flames of the nineties, and that’s exactly why it works. The melodic death metal foundations are louder and sharper again, but they exist alongside the huge choruses, clean vocals and modern production the band developed later. State Of Slow Decay, Meet Your Maker and the two-part title track rank among the strongest material In Flames had released in years. There are moments in the second half where the initial impact drops slightly, but as a complete record, Foregone manages something far more valuable than nostalgia: it makes the different eras of In Flames sound like parts of the same band.

LOUD[FRAMED] rating: 9/10
★★★★★★★★★☆

Released: February 10, 2023
Label: Nuclear Blast