“Things have happened so fast. This album became a therapeutic outlet”: How Orbit Culture are navigating becoming one of metal’s hottest bands

Niklas Karlsson has a thing for horror. In the upstairs office of his home in Eksjö, Sweden, Orbit Culture’s endlessly friendly frontman gestures to a bookshelf creaking under the weight of skulls, horror figurines, and what appear to be at least five different variants of the Michael Myers mask from Halloween.

Insisting that their real magic happens between midnight and 4am, and still shaking off sleep after another night of songwriting through the small hours, it is possible to imagine the bandleader as a sort of mad scientist sparking life into his gnarly creations under the cover of darkness. Instead, it transpires, it’s more about exorcising the demons within.

“Mental health can be horror,” Niklas shrugs with a smile. “Horror can be about mental health. Frustration is horror, too. Ever since I was a kid, I gravitated to the genre, the villains in particular. With our new music, it became natural to bring in some of those elements, and to embrace how horror and metal can go hand-in-hand. It’s how you paint the canvas: with blood.”

Indeed, Orbit Culture’s imminent fifth album Death Above Life is full of scary stuff. From the splatter movie bludgeon of Bloodhound to the psychological torture of Neural Collapse, icy atmospherics and pulse-racing thrills abound. There’s something of the Insidious series in there, Niklas reckons, perhaps even a little Saw. And although the frontman is quick to stress that OC are by no means a Satanic band, there’s something strikingly infernal about the scrawled album sigil, which has spread from the physical sleeve onto merch and even the mind-bending video for Nerve.

Rooted, obviously, in real-life experience, the swerve into deeper darkness and severity seems strange from a band with so much to celebrate. Five years ago, around the release of 2020’s third album Nija, Orbit Culture were still stuck in basements. Exploding online over COVID, 2023’s Descent saw them slingshotted onto another level, welcoming legions of new fans and sharing stages with Slipknot and Meshuggah, Trivium and Bullet For My Valentine. So what’s with the statements and songs about ‘choosing death’ and ‘walking away from what’s holding us back’?

“When you get to a certain level, people expect you to be happy,” Niklas reasons. “They don’t want you to complain. They just want you to shut up. But at the same time, when your band is growing, there is so much more work, so much more pressure, so much more responsibility. You switch around team members behind the scenes. You perform so much that it can be difficult to keep yourself and others organised. There is an expectation that you will be available 24/7 even while playing shows and taking care of everything else.

“On top of it all, there are people trying to get into your pocket. That’s fine. It’s part of the process. It’s how the world works. But with us it happened so fast in the background it was hard to deal with. Death Above Life became a therapeutic outlet to help us not dwell in the past, to cut ties with old ghosts. Sometimes it’s easy to think, ‘Fuck this, it’s too hard to be a band!’ Then we remember just how lucky we are.”

That’s quite a positive message. Wouldn’t the album be better called Life Above Death?

“Maybe…” Niklas cracks a grin. “But it would be weird for Obit Culture to name an album like that!”

True to that, keeping control of their singular artistic vision was a big part of Orbit Culture were fighting for. Hard lessons learned over years as an effectively DIY outfit had made the collective – completed by guitarist Richard Hansson, bassist Fredrik Lennartsson and drummer Christopher Wallerstedt – protective of their input on everything from composition and production to even the most seemingly insignificant posts on social media. Even the unselfconsciousness to process real feelings through violent music was a skill perfected over more than the lifetime of the band.

“As a teenager, I thought that getting feelings out on paper was bogus, just so fucking lame,” Niklas half-laughs. “But when I started to get stuff out of my head and off my chest it was so freeing.”

Even with access to some of the biggest names in metal – In Flames and Fear Factory on the list, too – there was no urge to take shortcuts or crack the formula for mainstream-straddling success.

“Being ‘mainstream’ has never really interested me,” Niklas nods. “But we would love for Orbit Culture to be our ‘main’ thing. Our goal for 2025 is to become the headline-standard band that we’ve wanted to be since 2013. There are certain things you have to do to get to that point, but I would never tamper with our music. Obviously we are so grateful to be getting these support slots on tours with bands we grew up listening to. It’s the best school of rock that you could ever ask for. We haven’t said ‘no’ to many of those chances – because you would be fucking stupid to say ‘no’!”

Compromise might not be on the cards, but shuffling through Death Above Life’s 10 tracks, you can hear vibrant influence surging through. The aforementioned Bloodhound and Neural Collapse hammer with the concussive thump of Slipknot and Meshuggah’s clockwork violence. Inside The Waves sounds like Trivium competing with In Flames to see who can sound more pumped-up. The Storm, a rare passage of “relief”, echoes the swell of early Amon Amarth and latter-day Gojira.

No moment is more emblematic of Orbit Culture in 2025 than soft-sung closer The Path I Walk, though. Compositionally, its heartbreaking five minutes echo old tourmates Machine Head at their most vulnerable and introspective. More than that, the recording establishes Niklas as a capital-S Singer, as soulful as Corey Taylor or James Hetfield, delivering a heartfelt lullaby to say goodbye.

“That’s the best description of that song I’ve heard so far!” Niklas smiles. “People might interpret The Path I Walk as an attempt to be mainstream, but that wasn’t our intent at all. It’s raw and stripped-down, but the lyrics aren’t really suitable for the radio. It just shows a different side.”

He admits that the fast, two-year turnaround between Descent and Death Above Life is the result of connected needs to process the discontent underpinning their stratospheric breakout and simply to strike while the iron is hot.

“It’s like an engine,” he says. “I had plenty of fuel, I just needed [the spark].”

Now that they’re cruising, the potential feels unlimited. Outsiders might see Orbit Culture as heirs apparent to Swedish legends like At The Gates and Arch Enemy, but having never really experienced that side of their homeland (“It’s more ABBA or Avicii country!”) they continue to march upward on their own terms. Next up is a Europe-wide tour with Portuguese black-metallers Gaerea and Finnish metalcore upstarts Atlas, including a main stage stop at Manchester’s massive Damnation Festival. Niklas is taking it all in his stride. Yes, they’re shepherding a remarkably ‘extreme’ line-up into some massive rooms, but this band would never have had it any other way.

“I know it’s a boring thing to say, but I just want to be playing the music that we love to the biggest audiences possible,” he signs off. “Big crowds just get my blood pumping. I’ve always thought that our sound suits those bigger stages, too. Even if you go back to our first EP – those days when we were a very young band playing in a garage down the street – you could tell that we wanted to be in the biggest rooms possible. Beyond that? We want to try to keep our focus on the present.

“When everything happens so fast it’s easy to have your eye on the next thing that’s coming down the road, and to not enjoy [what’s happening around us]. So our immediate plan is that we’re going to play these shows, welcome this way of living, and really enjoy the moment!”

Death Above Life is released on October 3 via Century Media. Orbit Culture tour the UK from November 8.

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