Mike Coolen has been Within Temptation's drummer since 2011, holding the post through the phase in which the band changed direction most. Born in the Netherlands in 1982, he joined just after The Unforgiving (2011), the album on which the group began moving away from the symphonic arrangement of the 2000s and taking on modern rock structures. That transition continued on Hydra (2014), Resist (2019) and Bleed Out (2023), with a growing weight of electronic elements and programming. His function followed that change and is more demanding than it looks: the live repertoire mixes material from four distinct stylistic phases, from the early gothic doom to the recent electronic rock, and it falls to the drummer to give unity to pieces written with rhythmic logics incompatible with each other. Coolen solves this with clean, adaptable execution, without imposing a single language on the whole.
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