Where dreams unite with metallic power
But we haven’t even talked about the album. The time has nearly passed.
N.: “No problem. We still will.”
The album promo from Napalm reads “Where dreams unite with metallic power” I think this sentence is so cool. I’m going to put it as the headline of my review. What do you think about it?”
G.: “It definitely fits the new album very well. We haven’t reinvented the music we do. It’s a genre that’s been around for over 20 years. We’re still very attached to the heydays that were in the early 2000s.We’re trying to make it more modern. What it would sound like in 2024.We can move a lot of people with that. Either because of the nostalgia factor, because they know the music from back then and think it’s cool that it’s being done again now. The big names in the scene have moved on in the last 20 years. The big genre-defining groups like Nightwish or Within Temptation. I think, I think, we’re quite good in that aspect, and I’ve been saying that for so long because I just think that we now, we never had this, this huge one-size-fits-all factor that makes us super individual now by somehow walking around the stage in such and such costumes, which a lot of bands do nowadays, the music is always the same, but the costume somehow changes or the theme.”
Either the costumes are the same, the music changes or the other way round, always the same music, right?
Cats rule
One of Nele’s cats jumps on her shoulder. Cats are always good entertainers who can interrupt an interview whenever they want and steal the show.
Oh, you have a cat, don’t you?
N.: “Yes, I have two.”
Ah, I’ve got three, and for once, there’s none of them jumping into the screen as usual.
N.: “This is the first interview today where she doesn’t want to lie still and, yes, she wants attention.”
Nevertheless, we continue with the interview and the questions about the album after we agreed that cats are cute. Yes, they are, but Gilbert takes over.
G.: “Just to end the question very briefly. Um, but what I think has set us apart a little bit and I think we showed that quite well on ‘Until Dawn’ [the first album], we really like very atmospheric parts that can go on a bit longer or something like that in general. And that dreamy, dreamy quality is something that we’ve already put into some songs, ‘Fall Into A Dream’ is a classic example on our debut album. I think that’s one of the things that I think gives us back our individuality and that’s also something that we’ve totally retained now. Well, it’s the same with the new album. It’s just what we’re into. Like that. And of course, it’s a bit heavier in a lot of parts than before. They’re a bit deeper again and there’s a bit of hard plurality added. And that’s why I think the phrase fits quite well.”
So basically, it sums everything up. What I have noticed is that you are also very orchestral orientated. Much, much more than other bands, as you said, the big ones. So, in my opinion you don’t need to hide from them anymore.
Ocean Of Treason
What I also noticed was that there were a couple of songs that I thought were really heavy. For example, “Ocean of Treason”, I thought it was really evil and dark. For symphonic metal it was almost doom metal. From there, how do you create these subtleties in the songs where you say okay, it’s all one genre but there are still these differences? How do you get there, do you just say let’s write a song that’s a bit more progressive or let’s write a song that could maybe be played on the radio or is it like that, how does the song writing work for you?
N.: “Well, I think we make the music that we feel like making. Well, that’s actually our principle and the way it works with us is that our keyboard player Pascal usually brings an idea into the room, shows it to us and then it often just happens that we say okay, let’s take two or three bars out of a two-, three- or four-minute piece and then a song comes out of it, and you actually always say you’ve heard it quite well, Gilbert. Then we kind of discovered the song and yeah, maybe you’ll tell us about it.”
G.: “Well, sometimes, like I said, sometimes these demos come out of a jam that Pascal and our drummer Martin, do somehow together and then sometimes we just record it on the USB stick, that’s easy enough for us nowadays with the technology, very easy and nice, and then there’s an element in there or somehow Pascal, our keyboard player, has hit a few keys by chance, where the rest somehow says there’s something in there or one of them says it and says well there’s something in there, I feel something, I think it’s great, this little melody that you played somehow and then we take it out of there and then we think about how it could go on so that it carries the same mood as the one before and then we always work on it bit by bit, So we’re always thinking about what would be great now, what would come next and that means we never approach it with a concept, we never say this is a song, it has to have this and this and this and this and so on, then we just lay it out, but it’s always the other way round and what it is sometimes at the beginning is what we start with, it’s not even clear if it’s a verse or a chorus or a main theme or something like that and so it’s a bit like an archaeologist slowly uncovering something in the dirt with a brush, like a skeleton or an old vase or something like that. Thus, we uncover it bit by bit, but it’s still a complicated process and sometimes we get lost and go back for another three hours to see where we end up, especially because we just write a stump and then everyone has to be happy, so it takes us a really long time to finish the new music. So at some point we realise, let’s say now, it’s always clear, okay, now this is a verse, now the first arrangements are coming in, so we know, okay, this could be a verse, this could be a chorus and so on, then there always comes a point where we say, yeah, now you can also look, okay, and then we’ll do the part with my solo after that on the chords of the chorus or something like that and then we can slowly decide if it’s going to be a single, I mean a little bit of structure, because otherwise we’ll get to the point pretty quickly, which might not last six minutes or so.”
A Vagabond’s Heart
It will be difficult to find a song of you that doesn’t last six minutes or more…
G.: “We just had the situation with the first single we put out, ”A Vagabond’s Heart”, we didn’t think of it as a single when we wrote it. So that was just a song for us at first, it was actually based on a very, very old idea, it could have been on ‘Until Dawn’, the basic idea is very old, we knew there was something there, we just had to uncover it with a brush. We had to go back to it, and we did, and we were really happy with it, but it wasn’t like that for us at first. We didn’t see the gold, what we had somehow uncovered and actually it was, the input came from Napalm, so they thought, well, it was definitely more than just a chorus, the chorus was really great. Then we were, well, at first, we were just a bit shocked because we wouldn’t have thought of the song as a single. Not at all.”
What would have been your first single, in terms of the thing?
G.: “I don’t think we had really decided, no, there were just a few choices. Yeah, so it was clear that ‘My Forever Endeavor’, the second song, it was clear that it could probably be a single. Ah, there was another one. I think the first song we thought of was My Forever Endeavor, I think that was our choice at the time. The other song for the single…., we had ‘Into The Vortex’ in mind for a long time, which didn’t work out.”
N.: “I didn’t want to say it, yeah. But Into The Vortex was also, it must be said, a song that we wrote in a very short time. So, it really was easy to write from start to finish, right. And I don’t know how long it took us, two or three weeks?”