1) On your website, every one of you speaks about his own musical influences. Is there any artist or music or CD that inspired you in the writing of “And the Battle Royale “ ?
Henric - I can only speak for myself, but all things that I listen to and enjoy might end up inspiring me. But I can’t say a certain artist that inspired me to write any songs on this album.
2) With “And the Battle Royale”, the fans enter a specific world (characters, animals, nature, ambiance). How would you describe this world ?
Richard - During the original trilogy it was a methaporic take on my own world and situation but in a more fictional setting. All characters, event and situations are inspired by my own reality. For the new album however I wanted to focus on good storytelling and dramaturgy, and not be limited by actual events. So I used the already established fictional world and it’s characters and built from there. It’s a fairly dark world but with a good balance of hope and misfortune. Just the right ingredients to whip up a good story and also describe some events in the band along the way.
3) By the way, could you describe the writing process of the new album ?
Henric - we all started to write songs in our home studios, came up with a couple of songs each, we focused on the best ones and completed them with vocal melodies and added lyrics lastly.
4) For us we will describe your music as Electro Melodic Metalcore. Are you agree with our analysis ? How you will describe your music style ?
Henric - we actually call it Power Core on this album, a mix of Power metal and metal core. But you can off course hear a lot of other elements as melodic death metal, rock and more. But I think you described our sound better with your definition.
5) Let’s talks about some songs of the album: a. we love the heavy and groovy song “Dark Metamorphosis”. Tell us more about the songwriting of this song and also the lyrics. b. “A Link To The Past” sounds great with the keyboards ahead. Tell us more about the songwriting of this song and also the lyrics.
Richard - The instrumental composition of DM is written by Roger and ATTP is by Richard Schill so can’t talk too much about that. The lyrics however! Death’s Sting, being the album opener, is also the catalyst that fire up the new story. Heaven and Hell is always a topical matter. In our story Hell have already been vanquished and Heaven and its operators is actually the “bad” guy and naturally not too impressed by mankind’s development. “Dearth’s Sting” describe the backlash against the world. The song is stuffed with biblical references but with more ill-intended and evil interpretation. Religion is not doing us any favors and that is underlined in this song. A Link to the past is more down to earth, straight to the point, relationship related matters, and I think most people that feel a close connection to someone can relate to it’s subject.
6) We know that you will play some gigs in November in Sweden. Any chances to have you in France and in an European Tour on 2018 ?
Henric - we would love to come there, right now we are looking into a European tour late spring. Where, with who and when is yet to be decided. But if you ask your festival bookers for us it is a bigger chance we get our asses over there.
