This strange little song suffers from a lack of originality and is probably the weakest on the Dance Of Death album. On the first verse, Bruce Dickinson adopts once again this harsh and raspy way of singing that characterised the decline period of Iron Maiden when No Prayer For The Dying and Fear Of The Dark were released. The main riff shows no real creativity and Janick's solos are quite horrendous, giving the impression that he's clumsily trying to pile up as many notes as possible in the shortest time available. 'Gates Of Tomorrow' has besically the feel of a B-side and seems to have been included on the album as a filler.

The lyrics are somewhat unclear and seem to allude to some super-natural entity whose main goal is to deceive unsuspecting humans and lead them astray. On the other hand, this character is paradoxically quite willing to free the emprisoned souls by cutting the threads of the web and then show them what the future has in store for them. Hearing the lyrics, I cannot help but think of the Fates (or M?rae), these ancient Greek divinities that, according to the mythology, ruled the mortals' lives. They were three of them: Clotho, spinning the threads of life; Lachesis, who wove them and therefore deciding of human fate; and Atropos, who randomly cut the threads of life, thereby being an early representation of Death. The song may then refer to humans being "trapped in the web" of life, from which there no escape.

Another explanation that many fans find plausible is that this is a reference to the Internet, hence the "Web". There has been a lot of controversy about the diffusion of music files over the World Wide Web and Iron Maiden have obviously tried to prevent the copying of their music prior to the release of the Dance Of Death album... and it worked quite effectively. Moreover, they seem to have thwarted all attempts to unveil the mysteries of the new album including the cover art over the Internet and seem to have had a lot of fun with it. Think of all the arguments that surrounded the release of the official cover artwork, and how so many fans thought that it was a joke and not the real cover. Could have Iron Maiden "cut the threads" of the World Wide Web? This seems unlikely, but if this instrument is supposed to be the "Gates Of Tomorrow", the future looks on the one hand very bright, as the Internet is the greatest encyclopaedia that ever was if you know how to use it properly, or pretty grim on the other hand, as abuses of the system and hours-long isolation in front of a computer screen announce ominously a slow but inevitable de-humanisation of the users.