Skydancer is the debut studio album by Swedish melodic death metal band Dark Tranquillity.

This release was the last recorded output to feature vocalist Anders Fridén, later of In Flames, who was fired and replaced by guitarist Mikael Stanne.

The album is considered one of the formative releases of the melodic death metal genre, and has been praised for its lyrical content, ambition and complexity, though reviewers and some of the band members have also criticised it for its production, as well as its songwriting, which has been described as unfocused.

At this time, the band primarily wrote more comedic songs, playing one show and eventually releasing their first demo, Enfeebled Earth in August 1990.

In an interview with the Nagual fanzine, Sundin stated: “when we formed the band we anticipated that we weren’t going to be satisfied with our music in, say one year, after the formation […] we planned to change the first name all the time”.

The label had initially proposed a more substantial deal for a full-length album, but it was whittled down to just a 7” release as the band wished to test the waters.

A compilation entitled Requiem - Morbid Symphonies of Death would eventually be released in 1993, including the song “Yesterworld” from A Moonclad Reflection.

The album was made up entirely of newly-written songs, with the band opting not to re-record anything from their past releases as they had enough new material to fill it out.

Two songs, “Soulbreed” and “The Dying Fragment of an Elderly Dream” were also slated to be recorded for the album, but were ultimately scrapped due to time constraints.

[18] The cover photo was taken by Kenneth Johansson, who had gotten to know the band through his job as one of the chief photographers for the Swedish camera company Hasselblad.

Something atmospheric, something which would evoke something interesting” and chose one of Johansson’s photographs which they considered “powerful and kind of serene, very evocative".

With Skydancer, Dark Tranquillity aimed to write a death metal album that incorporated melody and counterpoint, as well as complex song structures.

The songs are heavily dense with “20+ riffs that never are repeated in the same way” according to Sundin, and feature elements unusual for a death metal album such as clean vocal and acoustic guitar sections.

Sundin has also noted a classical inspiration, particularly from composers such as Henry Purcell, Gustav Holst, Edvard Grieg and Antonio Vivaldi, which helped to influence the way the band would structure their songs, as well as their polyphonic harmonic style.

In an early interview, Sundin cited romantic poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley as inspirations for his lyrical style, stating his lyrics were based on “thoughts and emotions on death and life in general: poetic, philosophical tales on existence and the soul.” “Nightfall by the Shore of Time” was one of the earliest songs written for Skydancer, having been written in 1992 shortly after the release of A Moonclad Reflection.

The songs “A Bolt of Blazing Gold” and “Through Ebony Archways” feature female vocals sung by Anna-Kaisa Avehall.