1- Hello, thanks for answering to our questions. What are you guys currently up to?    
Thank you! Well, we’ve been quite busy. 2015 was a big year for us; we spent it supporting our last release, the Collatus EP. We had the opportunity to play at Farmageddon Open Air with bands like Into Eternity, PallBearer, and Incantation. We also opened up for Insomnium and Omnium Gatherum at their Edmonton date, and spent the last bit of the year recording our new single.

 

 

2- First off, could you make some history of the band?
Well, Jeremy (guitarist) and myself (Andrew, guitarist) have been playing music together for about five or six years now, and some of those older songs still survive in Valyria’s music today. But technically we didn’t become Valyria until our lineup solidified with the addition of Mitchell (drummer) and Cam (vocalist and bassist). Our first release, Collatus, came out back in 2014 and we’ve been writing and playing new music since then.

 
3- How could you describe your sound?
We’ve definitely spent some time as a band debating and discussing exactly which subgenre of metal our music belongs to… great for long road trips! There are a number of elements present in our music. We’re hugely influenced by melodic death metal, mainly bands from the Finnish scene like Children of Bodom, Wintersun, Norther, et al, especially in regard to the keyboard and guitar interplay. But our goal is to expand beyond that sound through the incorporation of other elements, including harmony and dissonance, breakdowns, and both clean and black metal vocals. We approach each song as a piece that tells a story, so its progressive, in a sense. We want the listener to feel different at the end of the song from how they felt at its beginning.

 

4- What are the band’s main musical influences?
Well, outside of that Finnish death metal heritage, we each bring in wide variety of influences as we’ve each got fairly different tastes. I’m the power metal guy, Jeremy is prog and black, Mitch is mainly into metalcore/djent as well as some prog, and Cam just listens to anything metal. The end result of technical and melodic death metal is in a tradition that’s present in Canada… bands like Quo Vadis, Kalter, and even to an extent Cryptopsy are all Canadian bands that we admire for their ability to blend diverse elements of melody and brutality.

 

5- How is the feedback for your new album being?
This single, ‘Steel Inquisition’, releases on the 12th of February so we haven’t had too much feedback yet. Feedback on Collatus was generally positive, but there were some aspects of it that we definitely hoped to improve on with this release, which we feel is quite representative of our current sound and future releases.

 

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6- And are your personally satisfied with the final outcome?
We definitely are. When we got the final master back, I think we listened to it about ten times in a row.

 
7- How could you describe this opus in just 3 words?
Hmm… Theatrical, intense, and technical!

 

8- How has the production process for your new release been?
Great! We recorded the instruments and had it mixed locally, at Fluffbot Studios and Physics Lab respectively. After, we sent it away for mastering by Mika Jussila (Nightwish, Children of Bodom, Stratovarius), and we were highly satisfied with the final product.

 

9- And how do you use to work on the songwriting?
We don’t really have a formula for songwriting per se, but usually one of us will come up with the start of a song or a collection of riffs that we’ll all go over together and add to or take away from until we reach a final product that we generally agree upon.

 
10 – Finally, what are you near-future plans?
We’re playing a number of shows around Alberta this spring and planning a Western Canada tour in the summer. If all goes to plan, our next release should be ready not long after that.

 

11- That’s all from our side, thanks again for taking your time to answer our questions. If you now want to add some final words; feel free to do it.
We hope you enjoyed our new song. You can find us on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/ValyrianSteelCanada/?fref=ts and download our music on bandcamp here: https://valyriansteelcanada.bandcamp.com/. Hails from Canada!

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