Somewhere in Eugene, Oregon, Katatonia guitarist Sebastian “Svalle” Svalland is stuck. The tour bus broke down earlier in the day, the Seattle show got cancelled, and there’s been a lot of sitting around waiting for news that never quite arrived. When you get him on the phone, though, he sounds fine about it. Tired, maybe, but fine.
“There’s a lot of food here in America,” he says, and laughs. “All of us are rolling.”
It’s a good enough summary of where things stand. Katatonia are deep into a sprawling North American run, first as support for fellow Swedes Opeth on “The Last Will and Testament North American Tour Part 2,” and now pivoting into their own “Waking State of North America 2026” headline dates in support of Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State, out now on Napalm Records. That headline run hits Montreal’s Le Studio TD on March 11th, and Svalland, for his part, has never played Canada before. His knowledge of the country comes primarily from hockey, which he admits without any embarrassment whatsoever.
“In Sweden, when you’re young, you hear a lot of all the names. You see it in sports clubs, you see it in hockey. The names of the towns are from the hockey teams, kind of.” He’s already had a small taste of home; the band caught some Olympic hockey backstage before the bus situation derailed the day. He mentions losing to the Americans with the kind of mild resignation of someone who has made his peace with it. Canadians can sympathize!
Svalland joined Katatonia a couple of years back, first as a touring guitarist before the band pulled him into the studio faster than either party might have expected. He doesn’t seem to have found it overwhelming so much as clarifying. “I kind of got the feeling that what Katatonia wanted was not just a touring musician. They wanted someone to share this whole thing with. Everything was obviously going fast, but at the same time, that was a lot of fun. I learned a lot from the other guys. It was a bit hectic in the beginning, but that was only good, I think.”
Joining a band that’s been running since the year you were born is its own particular situation, and Svalland is aware of it. “Obviously there is pressure, but what you want to do is just to not take away anything from what Katatonia is, just to add stuff that you are. It’s impossible to not do it because you’re one human being.” The practical side of it was genuinely hard at first. His predecessor had a very specific style, particularly on the solo front. “The guitarist they had before, he’s a really fast guitar player, really good with playing solos, delicate solos. He’s a great guitarist. So those solos to play them live were, in the beginning, very challenging. But fun in a way because I never really did that type of playing, the faster stuff.”
Coming from Pain and other projects where volume and aggression are basically the whole vocabulary, Katatonia‘s range took some getting used to. “The biggest change for me would be the dynamics of the guitar playing. With Pain, let’s say you go full blast all the time. Katatonia has a wider dynamic range than whatever I’ve been playing before. That is something you obviously still learn and will never finish.” He doesn’t say this like someone frustrated by the gap. He says it like someone who found out a hobby was harder than expected and got more interested, not less.
His dynamic with co-guitarist Nico Elgstrand is something he’s still figuring out, and he talks about it with genuine curiosity. “We are polar opposites of guitar players, me and Nico, which is very interesting and fun, and I’ve learned a lot from him. He’s very much a guitar player that likes to slide into things, very smooth and floating. I’m more of a, maybe, short attack.” The age gap between them is not exactly irrelevant. “He’s 20 years older than me, so he’s going to have a hard time listening to a young fella tell him what to do.” A pause. Does he actually listen? “Yeah, he does, but you know, as a saying, you know.”
On the broader question of making his mark on the band’s sound, Svalland is honest about the pace of things. “I think that I have shown the other guys another world, kind of, because I come from another world in terms of the music side. But a band that started the same year I was born, if things are not changing as quickly as maybe I would think, that is also, you know, stupid of me to think, because I’m new or whatever you would say. Stuff takes time. You have a relationship with someone, it’s not as easy to just flip a coin.” He’s not complaining. It reads more like someone who has thought it through and landed somewhere sensible. “It’s not what I want to do either. If I see something, if I think maybe we could do this, maybe we could do that, the other guys have been in a relationship for a long time.”
If you’ve never listened to Katatonia and needed somewhere to start, Svalland has a clear answer: The Great Cold Distance. “When I started to listen to Katatonia myself, that was during The Great Cold Distance album. I think that is probably the album that would reach the most people. The sound is timeless, in my opinion, and the songs reach the point. I think that album is, from my generation, the gateway.” He also has a lot of time for The Fall of Hearts and Dead End Kings, the records that got him in the door before he was ever in the band.
Away from Katatonia, his taste goes somewhere unexpected. His favourite band is Pink Floyd, though he barely listens to them anymore. “I rarely listen to them because I’ve listened to them too much. Whenever I get to treat myself between the long times I’ve not been listening to them, I have a good time.” Asked for a favourite album, he skips the obvious one. “I think Wish You Were Here or Animals.” On the bus, the soundtrack has been considerably heavier. “We usually bring a Bluetooth speaker wherever we’re at. It would be a lot of different things. We’ve been listening to a lot of death metal. Wherever you are, honestly, it would be a lot of death metal.”
He’s also been chasing down a recommendation from bassist Matthew Manda, a bassist whose name he cannot for the life of him remember, despite apparently being genuinely knocked out by the playing. “Manda showed me a bass player that was kind of the guy who changed the bass world. I hate that I don’t remember his name now, but it was absolutely insane. I need to ask him for the name again. I’ve asked him already twice. I need to write it down.”
He hasn’t been to Montreal before and, true to form, hasn’t done much research. He knows Jonas Renkse likes it. He knows the hockey team. Beyond that, he’s just going to see what happens. When asked what he’s thinking about as he walks onto a stage, his answer is pretty simple. “All I want to do is go up and for us to have a good time, and everything is floating. What I want, if I could, is for the people to be there, try to be there. Maybe not just look at the phone, film with the phone. It takes you away from the whole thing. Try to vibe with us or whatever you would say. That’s why we’re in a room together.”
Katatonia headline Le Studio TD in Montreal on March 11th as part of the “Waking State of North America 2026” tour. Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State is out now on Napalm Records.
Photo by Terhi Ylimäinen
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