There is something deeply satisfying about ending a day with proper death metal. After spending the day moving through different corners of the musical world, I had the chance to sit down with Anders from Swedish death metal band Gluttony, and it was exactly the kind of conversation that reminds you why this music still matters.
Gluttony released their fourth full-length album, Eulogy to Blasphemy, through F.D.A. Records on March 13, 2026, and it is an absolute slab of old-school Swedish death metal violence. It has the HM-2 chainsaw bite, the horror-drenched atmosphere, the ugly grooves, the blast-driven chaos and the sort of riffs that sound like they were built to be played loud enough to annoy the neighbours.
But the thing that became clear during the interview is that Gluttony are not simply another band chasing the past. They are not interested in throwing an HM-2 pedal on the floor, maxing it out and calling it a day. For Anders, Gluttony is about carrying the spirit of that old Swedish sound while keeping the writing direct, physical and alive.
Before we got into Eulogy to Blasphemy, I wanted to go right back to the beginning with Anders, before Gluttony, before My Own Grave, before death metal even entered the picture.
His first core musical memory came when he was around five years old. His neighbour had an older brother with long hair, a denim jacket covered in patches and a room full of posters. To a young Anders, that room was like discovering another world. Iron Maiden posters, heavy music imagery and the mystery of something loud and forbidden pulled him in straight away. After Anders and his friend kept sneaking into the room, the older brother eventually got tired of kicking them out and made Anders a mixtape.
That tape had KISS, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Twisted Sister on it. Anders wore it out from playing it over and over. From that point, there was no turning back.
Like so many lifers in heavy music, once Anders found metal, he immediately began looking for something heavier. Slayer felt like the jackpot for a while, until a kid at school introduced him to Cannibal Corpse, Dismember and Mayhem. Hearing Hammer Smashed Face, Dismember’s Pieces EP and Mayhem’s Deathcrush opened the floodgates. That was the point where the music was no longer just something to listen to. It became something he wanted to create.
Growing up in Sweden during the early 1990s also meant discovering death metal while it was still forming around him. This was before the internet, when information moved through tape trading, fanzines, rumours and word of mouth. Anders spoke about that period as a genuinely exciting time, especially for a teenager surrounded by the mysticism of death metal and black metal as it was being created. There were great bands popping up in Sweden, wild stories coming out of Norway and a sense that the underground still had danger and mystery attached to it.
That danger is something Anders still thinks about. He reflected on how heavy music once sat outside the mainstream, how bands like Judas Priest, W.A.S.P., Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath were all dragged into moral panic, and how extreme metal later became more accepted in parts of Scandinavia. But he also feels things have begun to move backwards again in recent years, with people becoming more easily outraged by imagery, lyrics and themes that metal has explored for decades.
That makes an album title like Eulogy to Blasphemy feel especially fitting in 2026.
Anders’ path to guitar was almost inevitable. Heavy music is guitar-driven, and from early on he knew that was where he wanted to be. His first attempt at formal guitar lessons did not exactly go to plan. He went in dreaming of fast thrash riffs, only to find himself learning flamenco-style finger playing on acoustic guitar. After two years, he dropped out and took matters into his own hands by buying the Master of Puppets tab book.
He joked that he may have missed out on some of the fancy things “proper musicians” can do, but he learned how to riff fast. For Gluttony, that matters far more than polite technique.
Before Gluttony, Anders, John Henriksson and Max spent years together in My Own Grave. That band leaned faster and more death-thrash in its attack, and Anders described those years as the time where they learned almost everything. They learned how to write with other people, how to argue and keep going, how the record industry works, how touring works and how hard it is to make a living from extreme metal.
My Own Grave was built on speed. Anders said their motto was basically to never go under 250 BPM, and even their cover of Slayer’s “War Ensemble” ended up too fast. But after more than a decade, the fun started to fade. Life had also changed. People had families, houses, jobs, cars breaking down and other responsibilities. Writing a song over four or five rehearsals spread across several months became messy. The momentum was gone.
Gluttony became the answer to that.
Rather than making music more complicated, Anders wanted to strip things back. He called Gluttony the antithesis of where My Own Grave ended up. The idea was to return to that early demo energy where you could pick up a guitar and write a song in a day. The band jokingly referred to it as “AC/DC death metal”, meaning simple, catchy and direct. If a riff became too complicated, it was not Gluttony.
That sense of restraint is one of the most interesting things about the band. On the surface, Gluttony sound filthy, violent and relentless, but there is real discipline behind the ugliness. The riffs have to work. The songs have to move. The music has to remain memorable under all that distortion.
The addition of vocalist Magnus Ödling helped Gluttony fully become themselves. Their first demo, The Coffinborn, featured Johan Jansson, but when Vic Records showed interest in a full album, the band knew they needed a permanent vocalist closer to home. Anders already respected Magnus from his other work and remembered being genuinely nervous about asking him to join. He compared it to a wedding proposal, asking him over a beer and barbecue if he wanted to become part of Gluttony.
Magnus said yes, and his voice became one of the defining elements of the band. Anders spoke about vocals as their own instrument, and with Magnus, that feels completely true. His delivery moves from deep, gnarly death metal growls into more blackened screams, giving the songs a wider emotional and sonic range than a more one-dimensional vocal approach would allow.
Across Beyond the Veil of Flesh, Cult of the Unborn and Drogulus, Gluttony built a world of coffins, undead mythology, cosmic horror and blasphemous storytelling. Cult of the Unborn introduced the Casket Master mythology, while Drogulus moved into Lovecraftian territory. With Eulogy to Blasphemy, the band deliberately loosened the concept.
Anders explained that this is probably the first Gluttony album without one clear overarching theme. Instead, it moves through different horror spaces, from the film Martyrs to post-apocalyptic imagery and mass graves. That freedom also bled into the music. The band still love Entombed, Dismember and the classic Swedish death metal foundation, but this time Anders said they allowed themselves to pull from a wider death metal roster, including influences like Carcass, Death and Bolt Thrower.
That gives Eulogy to Blasphemy a different kind of energy. It still sounds unmistakably like Gluttony, but it feels less bound by the old recipe. Anders said the band had more fun making this record, and you can hear that in the way the songs move. There is more variation, more confidence and more willingness to let each track become its own ugly little horror story.
A big part of the album’s strength comes from the guitar tone. Anders has spent a lot of time searching for the right sound, and he is clear that Gluttony have no ambition to be a retro death metal band simply copying Entombed. The goal is to respect the roots while giving the tone its own flavour. For Eulogy to Blasphemy, they worked with different microphones, amps and combinations to find a guitar sound that could handle thrashiness, heaviness, buzzsaw attack, blackened edges and classic death metal weight all at once.
That guitar sound has extra responsibility because Gluttony operate as a one-guitar band. Anders does not have another guitarist filling space behind him, and the band do not rely on solos. In fact, there are no guitar solos on any Gluttony album. That began partly as a practical choice, because a single guitar suddenly breaking off into a solo would leave a huge hole live. Over time, it became part of the band’s identity.
It also made the writing harder in the best possible way. There is nowhere to hide. Every riff has to stand on its own.
Max’s bass plays a huge role in making that work. Anders spoke about Max alternating between acting almost like a second guitar and locking in as part of the rhythm section with John. That push and pull between guitar, bass and drums gives Gluttony their physical character. The songs are not just written at home and handed over for everyone to learn. Anders brings riffs or song skeletons into rehearsal, and the band shapes them together.
They also have a rule that keeps things moving: one rehearsal should produce one song. The first version does not have to be perfect. There might be what Anders called “anti-riffs” in there, simple placeholders that keep the energy moving, but the point is not to lose momentum. The band can come back later and refine things. What matters is capturing the feeling.
That mindset is the opposite of overthinking, and Anders clearly sees it as one of the things that keeps Gluttony alive.
Now that Eulogy to Blasphemy has been out for several months and the band have taken the songs on the road, Anders has been surprised by how listeners are connecting with different tracks. He mentioned “Corpses Eating Corpses” ranking higher with fans than he expected, while “All These Trees Are Gallows” has become his favourite song to play live because of its variation, thrash energy and Sepultura-like movement after the chorus.
“Immured by Rotting Corpses” had an especially interesting journey. It was the first song written for the album, and at first the band thought it might be the strongest track. Later, after the rest of the material came together, Anders felt it had become one of the weakest. Then Magnus added vocals, the song came together in the recording, and it ended up opening their recent European live set. Now it has come full circle and become one of Anders’ favourites again.
That kind of journey says a lot about Gluttony as a band. The songs are allowed to fight their way into shape. They are not polished into lifelessness, but they are not tossed aside too quickly either. The band trusts the process, trusts each other and trusts the instinct that brought them back to this stripped-down, riff-first version of death metal in the first place.
By the time we hit the quickfire questions, Anders’ musical DNA made complete sense. The first album he bought with his own money was Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. One of the early concerts that stuck with him was Entombed and Meshuggah in Sundsvall. His all-time favourite album choice landed on Danzig’s Lucifuge, and when asked which artist first made him want to create music himself, he came back to Metallica and the feeling that riffing could be something he might actually do.
That is the thread running all the way through this conversation. A five-year-old kid wearing out a mixtape. A teenager chasing something heavier through Slayer, Cannibal Corpse, Dismember and Mayhem. A guitarist learning from Master of Puppets tabs after flamenco lessons failed to satisfy the hunger. A musician spending years in My Own Grave before stripping everything back into Gluttony. And now, with Eulogy to Blasphemy, a band still finding new life in old death metal bones.
Anders also mentioned that Gluttony seem to be gaining some momentum in Australia, which is something I am more than happy to help scream about. If enough of us crank this album loud enough, maybe we can help drag Gluttony down under where they belong.
Eulogy to Blasphemy is out now through F.D.A. Records. Crank it loud, the neighbours are going to want to hear it.
Magnus-Vocals
Anders-Guitar
Max-bass
John-Drums
