– Hello, thanks for taking the time. How is everything going right now with TRUCKFIGHTERS? How are you doing soon after having finished your newest album?
It feels awesome, as always when you finally finished an album. We’ve spent about 4 months full time recording everything and it almost makes you mentally ill cause you spend so much time to make things the way you wan’t it to be. But now it’s done and we made it without loosing it completely, I think haha 😛

 

 
– This is our very first interview with you so first off, as some kind of introduction; would you mind to make a short history of the band?
Well, it all started just as a fun project, men and Dango (Niklas) meet at a sound engineer school in Örebro and we thought let’s do some stonerrock tracks and make it even fuzzier than Kyuss and Fu manchu. We both recorded and produced it so it was a very fun and nice project, and we’ve done it that way ever since. And what started as a fun project is still very much fun but of course we evolved and found our own identity, you get bored playing something that you’ve already played. That’s also the reason why we always try to make something different from each album. We’re not one of those bands that wanna make a particular song or album again just because it worked last time. We’re always challenging ourselves, and I think that’s one of the reason our fans really dig us. We’re constanlty evolving… Who knows how we might sound like in 10 years? 😉

 
– And how did you come up with such a band name?
We actually stole it from an old 70s’ really crappy book series, all written by different authors, and has lousy stories about driving your truck out in the desert. You should try to find one haha 😉

 
– You are hailing from Sweden (from Örebro more specifically), a country with a great Rock and Metal scene and that currently seems to be experiencing some kind of «revival» thing into different genres. Is it easy to stand out within a scene with so many quality bands?
As said before, we’ve always done our thing. We never look or listen to what other bands might do at the moment… We don’t really care to be honest. What we do is mainly for ourselves. Don’t misunderstand me here.. We do LOVE that people appreciate what we do and that they care about it, we have such awesome fans. But we only do music that we truly believe is awesome ourselves, we never try to do something that we think could sell or that we think other people could like. We’re not trying to sell us out, and I think people can hear the honesty and great handcraft in our music and that’s why they like it.

 

– Anyway you are playing a more US flavoured style, which isn’t something that it’s been done too much over there so, what prompted you to form a band like this in the first place?
Both me and Dango grew up with huge US influences… Who know Sweden is almost like a mini US, we have tons of movies and series on TV that are from over theres, we also never overdub anything. We have english in school from 10 years age and we do a lot of the culture that is implanted in our lives are influenced by US. We also had a lot of emigrants moving from Sweden to US many years ago so I guess the people of Sweden have a tendency to visit US a lot and visit old relatives or so… I guess the climate today has changed a lot, with more immigrants from other cultures, refugees and so on… So I guess Sweden is changing, but when we grew up we didn’t have as much of immigrants and new cultures to get inspired from than what we saw on tv and heard on the radio 😛

 
– And where do your musical influences come from?
Ohh, a lot of stuff… I would say the biggest inspiration for me at least is the wonderful life I live, with my family and the things I do. I love being out in the nature. In the wintertime I do a lot of cross-country ski, climbing mountains with Randonee, snowboarding and during the summer I try to stay outdoors as much as I can… We have such an amazing nature in Sweden and also a lot of almost untouched areas since we have a small population. Sometimes I go out on long tracking paths with a tent just to find the calm and peace. Sounds very much like I’m an hippie, but I’m not, I’m just enjoying doing things 😛 And THAT’s what really gives me inspiration to create… I rarely listen to something and think, this is something that we could make a Truckfighters song out of… I do listen to a lot of music but it’s a big variety of music and sometimes I’d just have a recommended Spotify playlist in the background.

 
– In fact you mix diffrent music styles, anyway you are usually tagged as a Stoner Rock band but, how would you define the sound of TRUCKFIGHTERS?
truckfightersI would say we’re more a progressive hardrock band but with a more fuzzy sound.

 
– For your newest album, «V», you have signed with none less than Century Media. How did everything arise? I guess you may have great expectations on this cooperation.
The thing is, we’ve done this for so many years on our own and we do like it, but we’ve reached the point when the time isn’t enough. We had two choices either find a very good person to hire to Fuzzorama and continue the same way or sign to a bigger label, maybe loose some but get the expertis of an already working crew is unbeatable. Here we get several people working for us on their own expertis area, which is awesome.. I think we both have high expectations.

 

– «V» isn’t out yet so, what can we expect to find on it?
Of course it’s the best album so far haha 😉 But this time we’re also very happy with the sound. Even though we’ve produced all our stuff in the past as well it’s been harder for us then cause we spread out the recording more… This time we recorded all the drums in one session and also spent much more time on it, to get the most boom out of the drums  😉 Also the songs on this album have everything that is needed. I can’t point out one song that is just a tiny bit worse than the other… And also every song has it’s own theme and doesn’t really sound like any other song on the album. We’re really proud of it and it definitly feels like something that can be our peek when we look back on our career 30 years from now haha 😉 Hopefully we also have a few more top-notch album within us.

 

– How was the songwriting process behind this album like? Did you go to the studio with everything ready?
We own our own studio so we basically been working in the studio creating song and as the 2 previous albums ”Mania” and ”Universe” all the music was written by me and Dango and we kind of had an idea how the drums would both sound like and play like…

 

– And how was the recording and production process like?
Me an Dango meet, not necessarily in our studio but at someones place and we created songs with a click track and Cubase. In the beginning we just record very rough and basic bass and guitar just the get the formula on how the song should be recorded. Once that is done, we usually record the drums and after that we re-record the bass & guitar + vocals of course. But this time, since we didn’t have a drummer at the moment, we recorded all the bass and guitar before the drums, a bit odd to do that, but it worked out. Fun to try something different 😛

 
– All in all, how would you describe your upcoming «V» in just 3 words?
Fat, good and awesome

 

– And finally, what are now your near-future plans?
Plav live as much as we can… First off is EU and beginning of next year we’re looking into the possibility for US, Southamerica and Australia. We’ll see if we have time to squeeze in a few more EU dates in that, would be rad.

 
– That’s all from our side thank you so much for answering to our interview. If you now want to add some final words for our readers feel free to do it.
No, just thank you for the interest in us and our new album 😀

 

Tania Giménez
tania@queensofsteel.com

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