DARKANE (Eng.)
– Hello, lots of thanks for answering our interview. How is everything going into the DARKANE’s camp right now?
Hi! We are right now working on tours for this fall. Still nothing is confirmed that we can go public with, but it looks promising.
– You have just released your new album, «The Sinister Supremacy». How are you feeling about it? And how are the first reactions being?
We are very proud of it and it feels like people all around are very satisfied as well. Judging by the comments on our facebook page and on Youtube people seem to think it’s among our best albums, and that is of course flattening.
– Once more you’ve got a «new» singer, Lawrence Mackrory, who sang on your debut album, so this is your second record with him on vocals. How did everything arise? Are you cursed with singers? As you have only had line-up changes on the vocals department.
Jens had lost his interest in touring, and we had a European tour coming up in September 2011. We already knew Lawrence was interested in getting back into the band so when we told Jens that Lawrence was interested in joining us he decided to step aside. He felt that he had other focuses in life so it was natural to get Lawrence back. We are very happy to have Lawrence onboard again, and it’s really cool to be the original line-up again. This time we hope the line-up is a keeper.
– Getting deeper into this new opus, its title reflects the darker side of the human mind. What did inspire you to choose this title and the whole idea?
According to Lawrence who wrote almost all the lyrics The Sinister Supremacy is a metaphor for “the evil that controls us”. It is the dark part of our minds and it’s inside us all. It tells us it’s ok to do bad things, to hurt other people, and hurt ourselves. It guides us into making choices based on pure selfishness, and it thrives on complete chaos. It is the source of pure, dark hatred. The black in our souls.
– And is it linked with the lyrics on the album? What do they deal with?
All the songs on the album are related to the title in some way, and Lawrence wrote most of them, and there are different topics. I, for example, wrote Humanity defined, about a person I was forced to deal with for a while. He had a narcissistic personality disorder and got into a lot of trouble, both with the law and people around him. Yet, he lived in an imaginary world where he was admired and everybody looked up to him. And all the shit that happened to him was not his fault. It was just bad luck. Good stuff to write about, but a terrible person to have in your surroundings. I think we can all relate to this. He is gone now.
– The cover artwork is a Rorschach test, so it’s also related to the human mind and psycholohy. If you don’t mind I would like you to elaborate a little bit on the art (the artist, how did you work on it, etc.).
It was created by Carlos del Olmo, who used to play keyboard in Soilwork, and also did a few of their cover artwork. It was his idea to do this Rorschachs test and it’s quite cool when people try to tell us what they see in it. I myself se some kind of Giger alien creature, but I’ve read in reviews that they have seen a butterfly, or the head of a ostrich. It’s simply up to you what you see based on your background, fantasies etc.
– Musically you are keeping your own essence, but you have managed to deliver an album full of energy. Is it easy to keep this energy and passion alive after around 15 years?
Yes, I think it’s still easy to related to the fast and brutal part of the music. I still have it in me that I want to play fast. It’s simply more fun than playing slow, even though slow playing is a lot more of a challenge. You can’t hide anything. I think we all have the passion for metal still, but it is nevertheless hard to come up with new stuff since we’ve been doing this for a long time and you don’t want to repeat yourself completely. You have to come up with something new while at the same time stick to the Darkane style. But anyway, we are still hungry deliver the metal.
– I could say since «Demonic Art» you have faster songs, maybe thrashier, but also with more groove. Is this something you were striving for or just a natural evolution?
I don’t think that we have planned on what direction the next album will go into. We just sit down writing whatever comes out, and when about 70% of the album is written we ask ourselves if we need more fast or more heavy songs to have variations on the album, so that’s when we write something that we need instead of what comes out naturally. Who knows, maybe the next album will be slower, and the one after that will be faster. One never knows.
– Due to this I would like to know how does DARKANE use to work on the songwriting process.
Klas, Peter and I usually comes up with ideas by ourselves at first. Klas often write the whole song by himself first and then maybe the rest of us will come up with suggestions on improvement. Sometimes I write a complete song by myself, but I prefer to incorporate Peters knowledge on arrangements. I think he has a great way of moving the sound files back and forth on the computer until the song is arranged, and it often ends up in very cool arrangements that I wouldn’t come up with myself. Also sometimes we can sit by the computer and Peter can come up with a cool drum pattern and ask me to put notes to it. That’s the way we’ve done since the writing of Rusted Angel.
– All this about «The Sinister Supremacy» being said; how could you describe it in just 3 words?
I’m very proud.
– And finally, what are your near-future plans?
We are making plans for tours right now for the fall. We really wanna tour as many countries as possible, and we’ve never played Spain, so that would of course be very cool. Nothing is confirmed yet, so I can’t say anything about it yet. We are also rehearsing a lot and trying to figure out what songs from TSS works best in a live situation.
