Interviews

The new album, Surtur Rising, is your eighth album. Is that correct?

Yes it is.

With eight albums behind you now, how do you feel Amon Amarth has evolved since the beginning to the point you are at now?

Well, we have all obviously evolved as musicians with our instruments. I mean I joined the band in 1998, so that was a couple of years ago, and a lot has happened since then. But we have grown as a band also, and have been able to create and get out to better studios and create better recordings. I think that is something that has affected us as well, throughout the years.

So over a decade since Amon Amarth released Once Sent From a Golden Hall, has family become a factor in how you approach touring and recording?

Not really. I mean all of us have wives and girlfriends and when we met them we were already involved with the band so they knew what they were getting into. Obviously if someone has kids or something like that, it will definitely affect the band and make it more difficult and sometimes they have to stay home or something like that. But I wouldn’t say it has affected the touring for the band or anything, I mean there is no one that has been really forced to be unable to tour with the band because of family matters or anything like that, and also none of the wives or girlfriends really demand that because they understand the band is important to us and that it is what we do.

In regards to the new album I have had the opportunity to listen to it quite a bit since I received it, and I am very impressed with it. How do you feel that Surtur Rising compares to your previous efforts, specifically to Twilight of the Thundergod. I know that album received great press and was a strong success for Amon Amarth, so were there any changes to your approach when you created the new album?

Well, we all felt that even though we liked Twilight of the Thundergod, it’s a great album, we felt that it was almost too nice. It was, like, too clean production wise, and we wanted to go back to a more aggressive sound like what we used to do, and we had to convince Hans to do it, and I think he was on the same page when we had our meeting about it. Our main goal was to make it more aggressive and rougher, but also make sure everything could be heard and a good production. And song wise we wanted to not be forced to hold back on any level. We wanted to basically be able to do whatever the hell we wanted to, more like how we wrote music in the past. We didn’t follow certain rules or song structures, we basically skipped all that and wrote songs the way we wanted to write them.

As I was listening to Surtur Rising, I found it to be a very diverse album. Though I enjoyed Twilight of the Thundergod, I agree that it was a much more polished production than your earlier work, and was a more straight forward sounding album. With Surtur Rising however, I found that while War of the Gods sounded similar to the previous album, other tracks varied in both speed and structure. Destroyer of the Universe, in particular, made my jaw hit the floor with just how fast and vicious it sounded, defintely my favorite track on the album. It seemed to me like this is one of the faster tracks you guys have recorded in your last few albums, would you consider that to be true?

Not if you look at beats per minute actually. It’s the slowest fast song on the album, but I can understand why it feels like that because it’s a very aggressive song, which gives it the illusion of being very fast. I think the BPM for that one is 178, whereas on those faster songs it’s up to 190 and the second to last song is around 260, which is much faster. I think a lot of bands are confined by the BPM, and it really doesn’t have to be that fast to feel aggressive, so that’s something we actually succeeded with on that song because we wanted it to be one of the most aggressive songs on the album. It’s the song that is about Surtur, and he is a pretty aggressive figure in Norse mythology, so I guess we succeeded in creating sort of a chaotic atmosphere in that song.

Amon Amarth’s musical approach and lyrical content have remained relatively unchanged for over a decade, yet the quality of your music has remained consistently high. How does Amon Amarth maintain this quality in their work?

Um, I actually don’t know. That’s something that we, um, we just try to make the music that we like, and we are very picky about the songs that we produce. Even if for some people it may seem that we just stuck together a bunch of songs and recorded them, but honestly it is a very tedious line of work behind it, to actually weigh and drop a lot of good riffs and good ideas that we have based on the fact that we don’t really feel it when we are working on it. I guess its just the way we work together now, we kind of push ourselves all the time, and that makes it possible. For me, I like all of our albums and all of our songs, so as long as we like the stuff we make then it is good for us, and obviously if someone else likes it too then that is great, but that is not our main objective.

Your planning on doing a solo tour in the US called A Night with Amon Amarth, where you will be playing the full album and also a set list with your older material, is that true?

Yes it is.

Is this your first attempt at doing something like this in the US?

It’s the first time we have done it in the US. We did something similar in Germany, but this is an idea that actually came from the booking agents in the States. We had to kind of book this tour on a very late call, because we had other bands scheduled originally that didn’t fall through, so we weren’t really able to find any suitable support acts that we wanted to tour with, and that wanted to put in the time and money into it, so he came up with the idea that we will do it all ourselves and since it is a shorter tour as well, we might as well just do it by ourselves. We will see how it works out, it is going to be interesting that’s for sure.

Alright, well unfortunately I am running short on time so the last question I wanted to ask is a bit of a personal question for me, as someone that is interested and trying to learn drumming. Being the drummer of a band like Amon Amarth, which obviously requires strong technical skill, do you ever feel that you have reached a level where you have maxed out with what you can accomplish or learn?

Actually no, you can always get better I have come to learn. When I was a lot younger I might have thought I was at my peak, and I was never going to get any better, but I pushed that limit higher and higher so I actually think that it is a constant thing. You are never going to stop learning as long as you are interested in playing the instrument, and I know there are a lot of drummers that are much more talented than I am, so I am confident that I can get a lot better than I am right now.

While we are on the subject, do you have any drummers that you would consider to have influenced you?

Well, when I started playing in 1991 the bands I was listening to were bands like Morbid Angel, Entombed, At The Gates, so those drummers had an influence. Also Napalm Death was a big influence on me back then, but in the last 15 years or so it has changed all the time, whenever music I am listening to has some interesting drummers, so it is always changing. I actually ended up listening to the latest Korn album, not that I am a huge fan Korn fan at all, but their new drummer is a really amazing drummer.

Alright, well thank you for your time. Do you have any final thoughts that you would like to pass along?

Umm, no I think we are good, thanks!

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