Chris Harris at MTV.com has issued the following report on IN FLAMES and their new album, A Sense Of Purpose.

The first thing you notice about In Flames' forthcoming album, A Sense of Purpose, has to do with aesthetics. It's vibrant and multihued, brimming with bright colors, which is to say, it's not very metal at all — at least not very death-metal.

But according to guitarist Björn Gelotte, In Flames wanted to buck the deep reds, depressing browns and dreary blacks that blanket most LPs churned out by bands of their ilk. "It's important for us to do something different when it comes to the artwork," he said.

The band commissioned Alex Pardee to handle the cover, which he based around a crude labyrinth game featuring a board punctured with 36 holes and a small metal ball. The object of the game is to avoid these holes. According to the band's rep, the game "represents life and the holes represent difficulties you may face during your lifetime." The cover depicts a small boy in an owl mask trying to get to the end of the labyrinth. Throughout his journey, he encounters various monsters and characters he tries to avoid.

"It's too easy to be categorized just because of your album artwork," Gelotte said. "I like that it has a lot of colors in it, because it just makes it easier for us to do cool artwork for the stage shows and for our merch. And the cover actually makes sense when you listen to the lyrics. But yes, people aren't used to aggressive metal bands having colors on their albums. It's supposed to be black-and-white with a corpse on there and blood, and that's death-metal, you know? But it doesn't always work like that. We've done that, and we've moved on."

It's doubtful that other death-metal bands will follow suit, but then again, In Flames have always been the kind of band that sets trends instead of following them. After all, the Swedish metallers are considered pioneers of what has become known as the Gothenburg sound, and they've influenced scores of other musicians since forming back in 1990.

"That makes me feel really old sometimes," Gelotte said with a chuckle. "Most of the bands that sort of sounded like a rough copy of In Flames on their first demos have evolved into something of their own, and that's all that matters. You always have to take what you're inspired by, mix your own juice with it and come up with something that hasn't been heard before. It's always been really cool, being an influence to someone else, and it's very flattering. You still want to see these bands evolve and have their own niche."

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A Sense Of Purpose is due out on April 1st via Koch in North America and the 4th via Nuclear Blast Records in Europe. The album will contain the following tracks: 'The Mirror’s Truth', 'Disconnected', 'Sleepless Again', 'Alias', 'I'm The Highway', 'Delight and Angers', 'Move Through Me', 'The Chosen Pessimist', 'Sober and Irrelevant', 'Condemned', 'Drenched In Fear', 'March To The Shore'.