I felt like they should have been more put together. The weird thing is, on the album there’s a long gap between them. “This is an intro for ‘I Am That Thirst,’ but it is its own track. Then we realized, ‘Oh, this thing is hopping.’ Lyrically, it’s imagining a drug you could take that lets you see things for what they truly are, whether that’s injustices or lies or even good things.” We weren’t really sure about this one until we heard Jens’ vocals and started mixing it. This is another one me and Dick worked on together. “To me, this one is a little bit like the Koloss track ‘Do Not Look Down,’ which was a little bit more rock and not quite as metal. We’re using this track as a tool on the album to take things down several notches and start over.” It also has a two- or three-minute intro that’s only clean guitar. For each album, he always writes something in the style of this, where it’s a little sludgier, with almost one foot in stoner rock and one foot in metal. “This is an instrumental, and it’s one of Mårten’s tracks. Instead, the gaining of power and personality cult becomes way more important than policy-directing. Lyrically, this is about how the well-being of the individual and the collective is subdued under the policies of tyrants and dictators. It’s a very short, rhythmical phrase that never starts the same way, which makes it weird to listen to. The song is using S&M vocabulary as metaphors for how we act in life as masochists or sadists on a spiritual level-as a species, but also as individuals being the threat to our own existence.” I heard him playing this thing about a week before we went into the studio and was like, ‘Dude, what is that?’ Apparently, he’d had it laying around for years, but it made it to the album with a week’s notice. “This is another one of Mårten’s tracks, and to me it’s one of the strongest on the album. As you get older and step out of your younger self, you get a better sense of how hurtful some of those things were.” It’s about memories and regrets over things you’ve done or said in life that you really wish undone. Lyrically, this is one of the few that’s a bit more personal. This was a song that I’d been messing around with for a while, and I put some weird, downtuned guitars on it, but then Dick came in and wrote real riffs for it. “We’re one of those bands that can sometimes write music and rhythms completely based around drums. And also, for kids, as far as body dysmorphia and all these filters that make you look a certain way-social media fucks with everything.” It’s become a political tool that people look to as some form of verified news outlet, reality it’s quite the opposite. It’s a commentary on how social media has changed everything and become such a tool for idiocy and disinformation. “This is one of Mårten ’s tracks, and he wrote the lyrics for it as well. It’s daunting and scary if you allow yourself to get into that mode of thinking.” To a certain degree, it was inspired by an interview with Elon Musk, where he talks about AI.

We had two or three hours’ worth of different riffs that we honed down to this. “This is a track that me and Dick worked on for a long time. It’s definitely an esoteric choice of first track, but I think it’s cool because you have no idea what to expect of the next one.”

It was a deliberate choice to put this first, a song that builds and builds, and once the vocals kick in, it’s not even Jens -it’s just warped whispers and stuff. We tried it again for The Violent Sleep of Reason, but it didn’t happen again. “This one is ‘third time’s the charm.’ We actually started recording this for Koloss back in 2012, but it just didn’t feel right. The title also references the band itself-we’re doing the same thing we set out to do many years ago.” Below, he comments on each track. “The cover art tells the story-you have a man that’s burning, but he’s still going for a knife. “A lot of the lyrical content of the album is social commentary on what we see happening around us, and man’s inability to change and evolve,” drummer and lyricist Tomas Haake tells Apple Music. Immutable sees the band honing and expanding the djent style they’re credited with originating while offering a glimpse of an ominous future. Nine albums in, Swedish tech maestros Meshuggah are still pushing metal’s boundaries forward.

Meshuggah kaleidoscope