Machinae Supremacy

Around the dawn of the millennium, Sweden's Machinae Supremacy launched their career on shaky ground, deliberately diverging from convention by laying down a standard power metal base and then threading it with both vintage and cutting-edge electronic hardware in an effort to disrupt the broader heavy metal scene. In practice, the outfit routinely threads its fundamentally analog-driven sound with 8-bit textures generated by a SiD chip, the type once standard in 1980s home computers such as the Commodore 64. Consequently, observers have tagged the band's approach "SiD metal," although its electronic components remain far less prominent than those employed by California's Horse the Band, whose "Nintendo-core" fabric is densely packed with timbres evoking the peak era of arcade and console gaming. The musicians themselves—singer Robert Stjärnströ, guitarists Jonas Rörling and Kahl Hellmer, bassist Andreas Gerden, and drummer Tomas Nilsén—are enthusiastic gamers, and alongside their official first album, the 2004 release Deus Ex Machinae, they produced a complete original soundtrack for the video game Jets'n'Guns later that same year. Spinefarm Records soon added the group to its roster, yet the musicians chose to dial down the electronic presence on the follow-up Redeemer, relegating the SiD textures to a background function while still venturing into unexpectedly mainstream and hook-laden pop territory. That same bold approach received further development on the subsequent album Overworld, which also introduced new bassist Andreas Gerden and appeared on Spinefarm in February 2008.