Former Arch Enemy vocalist Angela Gossow has firmly denied that she plans to reunite with her former bandmates after the departure of previous singer Allisa White-Gluz in November last year.
The Swedish melodic death metal giants, who celebrated their thirtieth anniversary last year, parted company their singer, who intends to focus on her solo career.
In the last few weeks, rumours have circulated that they plan to reunite with Gossow, who left in 2014 and now manages the band. She is credited as a trailblazer for women in extreme metal and enjoys immense popularity with their rabid fan base. Speaking of the situation before Gossow’s entrance, guitarist Michael Amott said that “back then, there was not one metal band who had a girl singer”. While Girlschool or Vixen may have disagreed, it is true that extreme metal c.2000 had nowhere near the same number of leading women as today, a change which can largely be attributed to Gossow’s work.
Gossow first joined Arch Enemy in 2000, following the departure of John Liiva, who was fired for his lack of dynamism. Gossow took them to new heights on albums such as 2005’s Doomsday Machine, which broke them out of the underground and expanded the boundaries of melodeath. Her departure in 2014 was friendly and a product of her wanting to focus more on her family.
White-Gluz, her replacement, had made her name in Canadian prog-adjacent metalcore act The Agonist, releasing three full length albums and one EP with them. Her time in the band was marked by commercial success and a reaffirmation of Arch Enemy as an arena-filling headline act. On the day of her resignation, she announced a solo single, ‘The Room Where She Died’.
Gossow this week came out and rejected any claim that she was rejoining the band, despite rising anticipation from fans. “It’s not ME”, she exclaimed online, “but thank you for all the love! I am really excited to be involved in this new chapter as the manager. This is gonna CRUSH!” The band are yet to confirm a replacement.
Arch Enemy grew like a rose-cutting out of an equally, if not more, brutal band, Carcass, whose 1993 album Heartwork is widely credited for birthing melodic death metal as a genre, before other Swedish bands like At The Gates took up the flame on subsequent albums like 1995’s riff-tastic Slaughter of the Soul. Leaving Carcass prior to 1996’s Swansong, guitarist Michael Amott wanted to start where Heartwork left off, founding Arch Enemy in 1995 with other active members of the Swedish death metal scene. Amott did not rejoin Carcass for their 2007 reunion tour or either of the two subsequent albums.
Members have come and gone, but Amott’s persistence and a string of significant vocalists have helped establish the band as a leading artist in the top brass of global extreme metal acts and one of the biggest bands to come out of melodeath.
