After more than three decades without a studio album, Coroner’s Dissonance Theory arrived not as a nostalgic trip but as the culmination of ten years of wrestling with time, identity, and creative fatigue. Guitarist Tommy Vetterli didn’t sugarcoat the long gap during a recent chat with Rodrigo Altaf.
“It took forever for salary reasons, private stuff, like people died and I got a divorce,” he admitted. “My daytime job… I produce bands all the time, and after working a day with a band, I’m not creative anymore in the evening. So I had to find time.”
Work on the record officially began back in 2015, but life pushed it into slow motion. Ideas were collected, abandoned, resurrected, and reshaped. The pressure was deeply internal, rooted in the weight of legacy.
“I thought a lot about how this album should sound,” Tommy said. “Should it be more like the green era or the first few albums? But that doesn’t make any sense. I’m a totally different person now. So I just wanted to do something that is still rooted in the past, but something new.”
That decision meant not chasing the sound of classics like No More Color, Mental Vortex, or Grin, nor pandering to the expectations of nostalgic fans. Instead, the band followed instinct. As Tommy puts it: “With Coroner I can do what I love and what I feel, and that came out.”
The riffs didn’t come from leftover archives — they emerged organically over a decade.
“The opening riff of ‘Renewal’ I wrote in 2015, but I finished this song last in ’25,” he explained. The track, which many listeners initially associated with Kreator due to the title, had no such connection. “Maybe they misled by the title because they had an album or song called ‘Renewal’, but at the end, it’s just a word. I had the choice between ‘What Remains’ or ‘Renewal’, and I just liked ‘Renewal’ better.”
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Recording the album followed a traditional, feel-based approach rather than the hyper-edited, quantized methods of modern metal production. “We worked with Pro Tools like everyone does nowadays,” Tommy explains. “But instead of recording one take and editing the hell out of it, we did more takes until the feel was right and kept the editing part to a minimum.”
“Sacrificial Lamb” stands out as one of the record’s most emotionally charged tracks. While some might assume biblical symbolism, the lyrics dig into darker psychological ground. “The lyrics are more about mass murder,” Tommy explained. “He thinks he’s doing something good for mankind, in his opinion. So he sees himself as the sacrificial lamb.”
On “Consequence,” a mechanical effect on Ron Broder’s voice sparked curiosity. “That’s a vocoder… the song is about AI, with all the good things and the bad things coming with it,” Tommy said. “It sounded a bit poppy at first, but in the end it worked.”
Instrumentally, Dissonance Theory demands serious endurance. “Almost everything is heavy to play,” Tommy laughs. “We always made our lives difficult with that.”
Tommy’s musical journey stretches beyond thrash. “When it started, it was Angus Young and Eddie Van Halen,” he remembered. “Then when Yngwie came, that changed everything.” His classical roots — “I played violin when I was a kid” — later blended with jazz influences like Scott Henderson and Allan Holdsworth.
However, Vetterli never cared about genre purity. “Styles were never important for me. For me, it’s just good and bad music. It’s a cliché, but it’s true.”
Despite being hailed by many as pioneers whose complexity influenced bands like Opeth, Meshuggah, Gojira, Obscura, and Tool, Coroner never crossed into mainstream territory. And Tommy is fine with that: “It’s a niche band… it’s for special people,” he says. “It’s not fast food music. You have to listen to it a few times to understand everything.”
Yet the new material has sparked an unexpected surge of enthusiasm. “Everybody’s super motivated at the moment because the reactions for the two singles are overwhelming,” Tommy added. “We want to tour a lot, and if everything works… There might be another album in two or three years.”
Dissonance Theory is the sound of a band refusing to be trapped by their past, even as they honor it. It’s not a return, but a reaffirmation of purpose by musicians who still enjoy making life hard for themselves in the most rewarding way possible. Or as Tommy put it, “We never tried to be Metallica or write a riff like that. We always did what we felt. That hasn’t changed.”
