Only a band as certain of who they are as Dark Tranquillity can lose two thirds of their classic line-up and still sound like themselves. The Swedes once had one of the most remarkably stable line-ups in today’s metal scene, but multiple key members left over the last decade. And yet, ‘Endtime Signals’ sounds more or less the same as Dark Tranquillity has since around the release of 2002’s ‘Damage Done’. Small details reveal that the album isn’t recorded by the exact same group of musicians, but stylistically and in terms of quality, ‘Endtime Signals’ delivers what one would want from Dark Tranquillity.

To be fair, ‘Endtime Signals’ does sound a lot more confident than its predecessor ‘Moment’, with which it also only shares three musicians. All the elements that make Dark Tranquillity the household name they are can be found on ‘Endtime Signals’: layers of Martin Brändström’s atmospheric synth work provide the foundation upon which Johan Reinholdz’ mildly proggy melodic death metal riffs and Mikael Stanne’s remarkably passionate vocal work can build freely. It just seems like this time around, the band is confident enough about the way they reestablished themselves to explore the extremes of their sound a little more.

By this I mean that the heavy, uptempo songs have become faster and more intense, while the more atmospheric tracks one-up the layered synth approach compared to ‘Moment’. ‘Endtime Signals’ as a whole is definitely more distinctly riffy than its predecessor. Songs like ‘A Bleaker Sun’, ‘The Last Imagination’, ‘Unforgivable’ and the particularly awesome ‘Enforced Perspective’ clearly signal that a guitarist is an integral part of the songwriting process. These songs need less time to get to the point than ever before and also feature some of the band’s best guitar solos to date. Reinholdz’ lack of solistic predictability is a great asset.

For a while, I was afraid that the fact that Stanne has a vehicle for his passionate baritone in Cemetery Skyline these days would mean that there would not be any clean vocals in Dark Tranquillity anymore. Fortunately, this is where the atmospheric tracks like ‘Wayward Eyes’ and ‘Not Nothing’ come into play. The Depeche Mode-esque atmospherics just beg for Stanne’s emotional cleans. The beautifully introspective closer ‘False Reflection’ even features his cleans exclusively. Arguably, Dark Tranquillity sounds best when both extremes are combined into one song, as is the case on the highly dynamic, borderline progressive ‘Our Disconnect’.

‘Endtime Signals’ is the sound of Dark Tranquillity’s desire to move forward again, after a few albums that felt like they needed to prove they still were who people thought they were. This is completely understandable and not even as bad as some people might think – both ‘Moment’ and ‘Atoma’ had far better songwriting than they are generally credited for – but this does feel like it has been created by a band unburdened. The worst thing I could say about ‘Endtime Signals’ is that it’s just another Dark Tranquillity album. The most positive that it’s their second best since 2007’s ‘Fiction’.

Recommended tracks: ‘Enforced Perspective’, ‘Our Disconnect’, ‘Unforgivable’