Fredrik Mannberg

Fredrik Mannberg — Swedish guitarist — founded Nocturnal Rites in 1990 in Umeå, and is the only member present throughout the band's history. At the start he sang and played guitar at the same time: Nocturnal Rites was born as a death metal band, and it was Mannberg's voice that recorded the first demo. The move to melodic power metal came later, with the arrival of a dedicated singer — a radical change of course, and a rare one: death metal bands tend to harden, not open up to melody. As rhythm guitarist and composer, the spine of the repertoire is his across nine albums and more than thirty years, a period in which Nocturnal Rites passed through three distinct phases — the death metal of the beginning, the Swedish power metal of the 1990s, and the heavier, more modern turn from Shadowland (2002) onwards, which brought the band close to contemporary melodic metal without the genre's fantasy trappings. He crossed two singers, four drummers and several changes of lead guitar, remaining the axis around which the band rebuilt itself in every phase, including the hiatus between 2008 and 2017 and the return with Phoenix.