Gothic band Tristania

Tristania is a gothic metal band from Norway, formed in the end of 1996 by Morten Veland, Einar Moen and Kenneth Olsson.[justify]Tristania's music is usually classified as gothic metal with death/doom influences (especially on the early albums), due to its strong ties with the goth metal's history.

On their first releases the band had a sound based on melodic death metal riffs with dominant eerie keyboard and powerful drums, and choirs. A strong influence in their music is also doom metal, which can be heard in the slow, melancholic riffing. Tristania put a lot of focus around operatic female vocals, haunting choruses and classical instruments such as pipe organ, flutes and violins. There was a bigger focus also on the death vocals of Morten Veland. This combination of death vocals with female operatics and majestic gothic choruses is believed by many fans to have reached its pinnacle on their Beyond the Veil album.

In recent years Tristania stepped back from the bombastic layer-over-layer productions and focused more on balancing the various vocal styles and progressing their sound without losing the overall feeling.

On their fourth album Ashes the vocal duties were done by the following:

* (Operatic) female vocals - provided by Vibeke Stene.
* Death Vocals (grunts, growls and screams) - done by Kjetil Ingebrethsen and guitarist Anders Høyvik Hidle.
* Clean vocals (hollow baritone) - provided by Østen Bergøy.

Their newest album, Illumination, featured the same vocalists minus Kjetil. There are fewer grunts on the new album compared to their previous work, and the ones that do appear are courtesy of Vorph from the band Samael.