According to the news I have read a short while ago, you have finished working on the new album. So, how did this process go this time?
Mathias: It was a long-long thing to do, because I tried writing music on tour and it didn’t really work out. We were touring so much in 2008 and 2009; there was really no time to write songs or anything. So we did our last tour in May 2009. Then we finished touring and I spent about a year on just song-writing until starting to record in March this year. We spent a lot of time in the studio and now we’re finally done. It’s been a long project, but it sounds good. It took time, but it was worth it.
You have said that the new album is kind of a leap forward from the previous works. What makes it different from what you have done before?
Mathias: There are so many bands that give out albums every year and they just sound the same. Even if you find a really cool band that’s really good on the first two albums or something, but then when they do the fifth album that sounds just the same as the first one, it gets really boring. So I think what we always tried to do is not to give into this, keep feeding the market just to get visibility and releases and all that, but instead invest in taking time between albums. Now it’s going to be three and a half years since our last album, it’s a fairly long time. But I think it pays off in the way that it’s not gonna sound like what we’ve done in the past. It’s not gonna be like German techno or anything like that either (laughs). The sound evolves and that’s what we want to do to move forward and do different things. And of course sometimes that means that someone who loved your first demo will not appreciate [the evolution] so much. But on the other hand it would be very boring for us to come up with a concept and then stick to [it] for 30 years. There are bands like AC/DC that shouldn’t do anything else; they’re good at what they do.
Have you come up with a name for the new release yet?
Mathias: We have a name for it, but it’s not really finalized yet. It’s like 90% sure it’s going to be that one, but I won’t tell you the name, because it might change (laughs).
Have you achieved what you wanted with this album now that the work is complete?
Mathias: The thing is, you lose your objectivity so fast. Even by the time we were mixing it, I didn’t want to say too much, because I have all the demos in my head and different references. It’s good to get in fresh ears to do the mixing and mastering. Jens Bogren mixed it in Sweden, so now it sounds great. But right now, when you’ve been listening to something for about 18 months, I don’t know anymore (laughs). Maybe the songs are just total crap. And every time I listen to the album again, I just hear mistakes everywhere. I need to stop listening to it now and then go back in 6 months and then I can maybe enjoy it more on the level of normal people.
What has influenced you to write the material for the new album, what inspired you?
Mathias: Well, our previous album was a pretty sort of thought-through concept album, historically based. For a long time the idea was that this story would continue over for several albums. That was the starting point for the song-writing. But then at some point, you know, having a concept or a theme might be very inspirational, but sometimes it might also start to feel like you’re backing yourself into a corner. You have to fit everything you do in this thing. There was this point where I really had to make the call that I can’t follow this as strictly as maybe intended initially, like when working on the previous album, and loosen up on the concept’s idea a bit more. So it’s gonna be a bit more universal when it comes to contents and lyrics and that stuff. It’s not so strictly tied to ‘we are now writing songs about vikings this year’. The lose framework is there, but the songs really are about the stuff that you could take to the modern day life or whatever. So in many of the themes it’s like you can place them in history in several points, whether it’s like the fall of Constantinople or the fall of the Soviet Union, you know.
Why do you produce all the albums yourself? Don’t you trust anyone else to do the job?
Mathias: I’ve been open to the idea of working with an outside producer. But the problem is when the projects get so big and when we’ve been working on it for like 6 or 8 months in the studio, it’s not maybe the most basic heavy metal album production. And a lot of it is built up as we go forward. It would be very hard to take someone from the outside and then try to explain everything about this, so he can start working on things 8 months earlier still knowing what’s going to happen later on. To be honest, I think it’s more a recording engineer who has some ideas, how to do it, but it’s not like in the big world, where you have an outside producer who is only producing and then other people do other things. I think that if you know what you’re doing or have a good idea and vision of what you want to achieve, it’s just going to get difficult and more fights [will happen] and that kind of stuff, when you bring someone from the outside.
"What are you fighting for...?"
