Tommy Eriksson

Tommy Eriksson — drummer of Nocturnal Rites' initial line-up — was in the band during the period when it still played death metal, before any record. Nocturnal Rites was born in 1990 in Umeå and spent its first years as a death metal group with guitarist Fredrik Mannberg on vocals. Eriksson is the drummer of that phase — the one that exists in demos and rehearsals, and not in the official discography, which only begins in 1995 with In a Time of Blood and Fire, already in another genre and with another line-up. It is the kind of participation that usually vanishes from the historical record, but which defines the point of departure: the band that would become a reference in Swedish power metal started out playing something else, and Eriksson belongs to that beginning.