We celebrated Gorement‘s cult classic The Ending Quest with a Hall of Fame induction of the album in Decibel‘s June 2025 issue, but we wanted even more coverage of this mid-’90s death metal landmark. So HOF author José Carlos Santos corralled guitarist Patrik Ferlund to provide this exclusive track-by-track breakdown of The Ending Quest, so take it way, Patrik!
My Ending Quest
The first track. In fact, the first track that I wrote after we had done the Into Shadows EP, too. You can hear the Bolt Thrower vibes, I think it just reeks of that band. That’s typical me, it’s a special band for me. At that time I was also a lot into At the Gates, the Gardens of Grief EP. If you listen to the mid part, that’s actually me trying to do a nice copy of At the Gates with the harmony parts. Also the first lyric written by [vocalist] Jimmy [Karlsson] that was a little more “poetic” than the earlier lyrics we did. This went a little viral on the internet at one point, I’ve seen a lot of covers of it, even a piano version. Also, I’ve seen a strange vocal cover of it. It’s a sort of our signature song; it became that over the years.
Vale of Tears
This and the opener were the two songs we wrote over the summer of 1992. We thought we shouldn’t be too doomy, we had all those really heavy doom tracks already, so we decided to do a more back to basics, more direct, faster one, like what we had done with “Darkness of the Dead” and “Human Relic.” As you can hear, a lot of Entombed and Dismember influences there, with some quite tricky drum parts. It’s a nice fast one.
Human Relic
That’s a typical Patrik Fernlund song from 1991. The main riff is inspired by a Benediction track, “Artefacted Irreligion” from Subconscious Terror. At that time I was also heavily into Xysma, the Finnish grind masters. It’s my usual melting pot of different stuff, a lot of tempo changes and stops. As far as I’m concerned, this is our real signature song, to be honest. As a curiosity, Italian band Daemoniac actually did a cover of it, and invited me to play guitar on it, it’s on their 2019 album Dwellers of Apocalypse.
The Memorial
I did the lyrics on this one, it was the track, together with “Obsequies of Mankind,” that really formed our sound, we found the formula for our style with these two songs. It’s our first attempt to write songs in a more complex kind of way, sort of progressive, telling a story throughout. Again, a lot of At the Gates influences on some of the riffs, and a lot of Crypt of Kerberos, too, I loved their second demo and the Cyclone of Insanity EP. I never wanted to copy anything, but I tried to have the vibes of the stuff I liked on my songs.
The Lost Breed
There you have it, the epic! Lots of Crypt of Kerberos and At the Gates in that track, again. Melody-wise, I imagined I was the [Paradise Lost guitarist] Greg Mackintosh of Gorement! We really came up with a good track on this one, I think. I remember sitting at home, playing some riffs, some melodies, then went into the rehearsal room, we arranged it and we made something of it, of all these different parts. It really feels like a complete song to me, all the parts ended up fitting so well together, the dynamics are great. I think we really hit it with this one. This is the one that should be our signature song!
Silent Hymn (for the Dead)
That was when we panicked a little bit. Around the end of 1992, we still didn’t have the last song we needed to complete the ten. So we came up with this sort of intro, you can actually hear some similarities with the intro to Paradise Lost’s first album, with the harmony parts. So I had that part, and I came up with this theme, and the guys thought that melody that starts the track sounds a little bit like the intro melody for a children’s program we watched when we were kids in the ‘70s. The working title for this song was actually “Alfons Åberg,” which was the name of the show. We thought we’d slip it in as an intro, or as an instrumental interlude in the middle of the album. It’s not complete, we know it, there’s so much missing here, but we were panicking, we had to send the tape to the producer and we were out of time. In fact, in the end I suggested we take the solo part from “Process of Cent” off the second demo, put that in, and then end it with the last part of ‘Moulder Within’ from the first demo. So we actually stole bits and pieces, gave some old parts a better fate to complete it. It ended up working in the context of the album, strangely.
Sea of Silence
The other “epic” track on the album alongside “The Lost Breed.” This one is basically me trying to make my best Paradise Lost impression, Gothic style – hence the female vocals that I wanted to have on it. We could actually remake a good version of it just taking the track from the album and having someone do the vocals over it.
Obsequies of Mankind
Originally, the last song on our second demo. Again, I came up with some Crypts of Kerberos-ish riffs there. More importantly, I think this was the first track where I started to try out the At the Gates harmonies. They have a really strange way to build harmonies, especially on those first few records with Alf [Svensson]. They’re not really following each other, it’s very odd but very tasteful. I was really impressed by that, and I wanted to explore that on this one.
Darkness of the Dead
The first song that we wrote as Gorement! In the beginning of 1991. This is another song that reeks of Bolt Thrower. I had just bought the War Master album, and that has an effect on you. I think that’s noticeable on this track, but I really like it. The lyrics were written by all five of us, down in Germany, during the recordings. Poor Jimmy, we actually wrote the lyrics the night before he was supposed to do the vocals. But he nailed it, it sounds great. We had quite a lot of beers back then, and when we read them the morning after, we were all like, okay, what does this mean? Everything just sounded so strange. It’s funny that we say “lost paradise” at one point. But it all worked!
Into Shadows
Sadly, I have to give the honor to Crypta Records for the order of the track list, that’s the one thing they did right, this ended up being a very good closing song to the album. A lot of Tiamat influences, I really loved The Astral Sleep album. I had just bought an acoustic guitar and wanted to do some nice stuff on it. I’m not very good at it, but I do like the acoustic part on this song. They keyboard parts are also really good and I have to give credit to Dan Swanö on that one – when we did the EP back in May 1992 with him, I told him I’d like to add some atmospheric keyboard parts, and he nailed it in five minutes. He’s a musical genius. Naturally we used those parts on the album.
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