Josh Rundquist of That Drummer Guy recently conducted an interview with drummer Jonas Ekdahl of Swedish melodic metallers EVERGREY. You can listen to the entire chat below. A few excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). On the band's latest studio album, "The Atlantic": Jonas: "I'm very happy about it. It turned out as exactly as we wanted it, both music-wise and production-wise as well. I think it's a very, very solid album, and I'm very happy with the results. We always kind of work our asses off for every album, and it's kind of draining for your mind mentally. But in the end, it's always worth it when you feel that you're as happy with the results six months after the album is [released] as you were when the album was done. Yeah, hard work pays off. Now it's time to do the touring work. That's the best part." On EVERGREY's progress over the years: Jonas: "The main thing, I think, is that we still have an urge to progress as a band and musically and as songwriters and become better musicians. So that's something we always strive for when writing new music. We want to take on new challenges and we're not afraid to go down different roads we haven't been before. But we still have kind of like a, I don't know…it will always end up sounding EVERGREY in the end anyway. I think we're kind of one of those bands that we like taking inspirations from all over the place and the music scene, not only focus on listening to other metal or stuff like that. We listen to top 40 pop music and we listen to soundtrack and we listen to black metal and electronic music as well. Whenever we feel like we can incorporate something new into the music — of course, there's kind of a limit to how far you can or it won't sound like us. So far, we know where that boundary is. One thing that's pretty cool is we write other kinds of music outside of EVERGREY, which has been a huge outlet for us. So, when we write EVERGREY music, everything is filtered out, which is very cool. It has been very helpful for the last album, actually." On playing in front of American audiences: Jonas: "It feels great. It feels great to have an album like this to show off for the fans, even new people who haven't heard us before, to present ourselves in our best possible way in the live setting. Yeah, it's a shame we don't come here as often as we want to. We kind of need to be here more frequently to get a bigger crowd, but we're super-happy to be here and the fans have been great so far. We just keep going." EVERGREY is currently touring North America, with SHATTERED SUN and TULIP in support. "The Atlantic" was released January 25 via AFM Records. The band again teamed up with Jacob Hansen, who — just like with the band's previous releases "The Storm Within" and 2014's "Hymns For The Broken" — took care of mixing and mastering.
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