Orbit Culture and In Flames on the Crown In The Grave tour: how the Gothenburg sound reached a band from Eksjö

Orbit Culture spend November and December 2026 opening arenas for In Flames, the band whose sound people keep hearing in theirs. Niklas Karlsson says the influence came from America. The records say otherwise, and the gap between the two is the subject of this piece.

Ten months, three tours

Orbit Culture released Death Above Life on October 3, 2025, their fifth album and their first on Century Media (Wikipedia). That record carried them into their first North American headline tour, February 18 to April 10, 2026, with Ov Sulfur and Atlas in support (Blabbermouth). Then in July, Trivium announced the Crown In The Grave tour: 32 North American dates from November 5 in St. Petersburg, Florida, to December 19 in Charlotte, North Carolina, with In Flames as special guest on every night (Blabbermouth).

One detail matters if you are buying a ticket. Orbit Culture do not play the whole run. Fit For An Autopsy takes the first stretch, and Orbit Culture come in from November 20 at Royal Oak, Michigan, and stay through Charlotte on December 19 (Theprp). So the nights where the lineage is on stage, both halves of it, are the second half of the tour.

Trivium are selling the run as the unofficial start of their next era, with new songs and their first big North American tour with drummer Alex Rüdinger. This piece is about the two bands further down the bill.

Eksjö is not Gothenburg

Every write-up of Orbit Culture reaches for the word “Gothenburg” within two sentences. The band is from Eksjö, a small town in Småland, and formed there in 2013 around Niklas Karlsson, who writes and produces the material (Wikipedia). Eksjö is roughly 250 kilometres from Gothenburg. There was no scene to join. Karlsson and the original guitarist met through mutual friends at seventeen, rented a room in a former power station and spent the summer of 2013 recording their first EP.

That distance matters. The Gothenburg sound of the 1990s, the In Flames and At the Gates records that gave melodic death metal its name, was a local thing: same rehearsal rooms, same studio, same people swapping members. Orbit Culture got none of that. They built their audience on streaming and YouTube, self-releases and a small label, and then on European support tours. Whatever Gothenburg they carry, it arrived by record, in a town with no scene to hand it over.

The quote that breaks the easy story

Talking to Knotfest in November 2022, Karlsson put the band’s primary influence in the United States and said outright that “we were always more interested in the 80’s and 90’s music from the US,” naming thrash and Metallica before any Swedish band (Knotfest). He knows In Flames and Meshuggah exist. He just did not grow up copying them.

Then he concedes the point anyway, almost as an aside: “there is still something in the water here, so you will still hear melodic death metal in there, but we’ve merged it together.”

Put the two sentences together and the story is better than “fans open for their heroes.” Karlsson says he was aiming at California, and the result sounds like it came out of Gothenburg. The influence he chose is one thing. The one that showed up uninvited is an inheritance, and that is what this piece traces.

Where you can hear it

You can test the lineage claim yourself with three records and thirty seconds of each.

Start with Metallica’s Master of Puppets from 1986. Listen to the guitars under the verses: dry, choked, hammering the same low note in blocks, everything played with the wrist. That is the American thrash engine Karlsson says he wanted.

Now put on In Flames’ The Jester Race from 1996, which works differently. Two guitars carry a tune together, one sitting just above the other, and the lines are ones you could hum walking out of the venue. The songs are fast, but they sing.

Now play anything from Death Above Life. Underneath, the Metallica chug, heavy and dry. On top of it, two guitars playing a line together the way In Flames did in 1996, before the big sung chorus arrives. Karlsson called it a merge, and you can hear the seam. The bottom half of the sound is the one he chose. The top half is the one Sweden gave him without asking.

Eksjö had no scene, so the sound came in through headphones, and what came through headphones was Gothenburg, whether or not the teenager listening was aiming at Metallica.

This is the second time, and that changes the reading

The tidy version says the circle closes this November. It closed four years ago. Orbit Culture supported In Flames in Europe in 2022, and Karlsson describes those weeks as the moment he realised the band had become something real. “After that first day we played with In Flames, we hung out basically every other day,” he told Knotfest, adding that “now they feel like uncles or our older brothers” (Knotfest).

Uncles is a more precise word than the one the press uses. Parents raise you on purpose. Uncles are the relatives whose habits you pick up anyway, from being in the house. Karlsson chose Metallica as the parent and ended up with In Flames as the uncle, and in 2022 the uncle turned out to be a real person who barbecues.

What changes in 2026 is scale. In 2022 it was European club rooms. Now it is a month of North American theatres and arenas, on a bill headlined by Trivium, who in their own tour announcement credit In Flames as the band that “influenced our early years.” Count the generations on that stage on any night from Royal Oak onward: In Flames, who built the sound in Gothenburg; Trivium, from Orlando, who absorbed it across an ocean in the early 2000s; Orbit Culture, who absorbed it from 250 kilometres away while claiming to be listening to something else.

The thread to pull next

At the Gates and Dark Tranquillity belong in the wider Gothenburg story, but neither band is on this tour. In Flames is the only one of the Gothenburg originals on the bill, and the lineage as it will actually stand on stage runs through them alone.

That leaves a question the lab cannot answer from a desk. Karlsson’s anchor quote is from 2022, before Death Above Life existed. Has he said anything since about In Flames, now that his band has toured with them, signed to a bigger label, and written the record that people hear the most Gothenburg in? If you have seen an interview from the Death Above Life cycle where he addresses it, that is exactly the kind of thing we want in the notebook. Tell us at @realrocklab on Threads or X.

And a second one, for anyone who catches a date after November 20: which In Flames song does the room sing loudest, and does Orbit Culture’s set earlier that night make you hear it differently?

Sources: Wikipedia, Orbit Culture · Wikipedia, Death Above Life · Blabbermouth, Crown In The Grave announcement · Blabbermouth, Orbit Culture 2026 headline tour · Theprp, tour date split · Knotfest, Niklas Karlsson interview, November 2022