…get lost when you mix them with the band. For example, Almut ‘Ally’ Storch-Hukriede, who I got to know through our new guitar player Rob Klawonn, he plays in a solo band Ally the Fiddle – but I think she’s more known for her playing violins in Subway to Sally. That was really great for her to play violins and cello on the album, it was giving things a nice touch. It was all very exciting to work with new people, and take it as a challenge to brin…
…Renegade tour with Virgin Steele and Freedom Call. From there I was a full-blown metalhead. I started as a self-taught musician for a couple of years, and then I went to a musical-oriented high school. I had lessons for three years, not only the drums but for music theory in general. Played bass for a while, a lot of choir singing. A lot of this just ended up being for fun. Dead Rhetoric: You started Screamer in 2009 – what do you remember about…
…t forty years. Dead Rhetoric: Discuss the work behind the European, limited-edition box set – as it includes numerous bonuses, a 72-page book, double colored vinyl, posters, and more? Do you enjoy creating something special for the diehards and collectors who take the time, effort and money to support the band in this manner? Angelripper: We have a single, an EP, we recorded “Witching Metal” in the same way as we had recorded it on the demo tape….
…kay. Dead Rhetoric: Did you enjoy the special camera angles – a lot of back-and-forth action as well as reverse and upside-down things going on? Wagner: Yeah, it fits a bit to the tempo of the song. There is some fantastic camera action that the director of the video did there. Dead Rhetoric: After numerous cancellations, Rage will finally be going on a co-headlining tour across Europe this fall with Brainstorm. How will it feel for the band (and…
…chords with the bassist, and by January 2022 we were in the studio. By mid-January to the end of February we tracked the album. We sat at home wondering when everything was going to open up and then things opened up fast. It worked with our schedule; they could get the album out in June. We did the pre-tour with Misery Index before the album came out. We played two songs from the album before they released the first single. People got a good idea…
…cord, did a fantastic job with this. Dead Rhetoric: There is a lot of socio-critical commentary that you discuss lyrically on this record: topics including progressive destruction of the environment, a call for non-violence, worries about humanity and the treatment of the planet, plus the widespread global drug addiction problem. As singers in this platform, what do you hope to achieve that matches the passion of your music through this content? A…
…Iron Maiden, I brought the brochure home, Eddie came on the stage, a larger-than-life thing. I knew I wanted to play music – I wanted to play bass because of Gene Simmons. I bought my first bass guitar when I was 14, had it paid off mowing yards when I was 15, with a layaway plan. I was never a real big cover music type of guy. I wanted to be on stage, and I needed to write music. We wanted to come up with songs, the easiest way to do that was get…
…rradiation). Everything was recorded right away so that we always had an up-to-date demo version (and pre-production) to listen to and continue working on. Taking these versions to the studio also helped a lot finding the perfect sound! Dead Rhetoric: Where does the band come across on the lyrical content? Do you place as much importance on what you try to convey with words as you do the musical compositions? Anika: The link between music and word…
…e an outside the box track and make it metal rather than going with a tried-and-true staple… Scott DeGruyter: Basically, we decided as a team to do ABBA. It’s a fun song that we anticipate would be crazy live for people to scream their lungs out to. Everyone knows that song, plus we added the speedy section to make it even more metal than you can even imagine (laughs). Colin: It was probably alcohol influenced. It’s funny, ABBA when you break down…
…verything proper. You find out during the holidays, you need money for self-employment, I did everything out of love. I was working to the limit. This was really strange, and I broke down after she left. You know the movie, Forrest Gump? He was running and running, and I did it in another way, writing and writing. I did a lot of lyrics, it was a kind of medicine to write lyrics, write songs about this. When you are listening to the song “Out of th…
…lot of heart and soul into their work. They put out Forever the first mini-CD and Tides the first full-length album. Albums number two and three were on Metal Blade. I’m really happy they gave us a chance there, we were such a small band on their big label. We are not a touring band, we’ve never been, we don’t draw a lot of money into a label. I’m very grateful they took us on there and put our albums out, I understand we are too small for them….
…to the wait times with the manufacturing plants. Do you believe this built-up anticipation with the fans for your release – and do you still enjoy the process of making videos and gaining feedback for your work? Nyman: It was very unfortunate that the release had to be pushed back one time. And then we had to push back the vinyl release once more. Obviously, I think we gained on releasing all those singles as we did. The main idea was to release…
…ing, we were in the COVID-19 scenario, so we worked together with Zoom and Skype. He had some fantastic songs already, and he just showed me and told me to follow some of the vocal lines, but also write lyrics and if I had some ideas for different songs to do the vocal lines on my own. It was 50/50 for him having great ideas for the vocals and me having great ideas for the vocals. The lyrics, I did most of the lyrics. It was hard work, it’s not ea…
…atmosphere and keeping the interest of your listeners through an eleven-and-a-half-minute track? Hudson: Oh yes. “Nature’s Revenge” is the first long song I’ve ever written. I have always had the vision for one. Long songs can get really boring really fast. Especially if there is a lot of orchestration, they can be hard to listen to. I never had anything to talk about, so that’s why I never wrote a long song. This is about the pandemic. When the p…
…tone was important. In 2018 I already knew this album was going to be a sci-fi/cyber punk-oriented, and it needed the cover art that shows visually that it can relate to the topics of the lyrics. There’s the beast that is in front of the woman, it represents the connection between a living creature and an artificial creature. It’s there in the artwork as well as the lyrics, so they support each other. He did a good job with that. Dead Rhetoric: Yo…
…re. At the moment it’s a big problem, (the fans) are not willing to buy pre-sale tickets for festivals because of COVID-19. After all, the thrash scene, especially in our whole area of Dortmund, the best thrash metal bands came from this area like Sodom, Kreator, there is a big scene. We have the full support from the people. Playing shows or planning festivals is complicated, people are afraid. We thought with the first festivals when they start,…
…s a new generation with more modern ideas. It’s important for me to be open-minded, and I am definitely open-minded. Dead Rhetoric: How do you feel about the work of AFM Records as your label that you’ve been with 2004 with Thunderball? What makes them the perfect partner to work with after all these years? Dirkschneider: It’s more like a family to me. You can talk to each other, what we have to do, where we have to put more power on. Everybody kn…
…about this cover? Lewis: I love it. We consciously wanted to go really old-school, you know? During the pandemic we had nothing to do, we were watching all the old sci-fi, action movies. Escape from LA, Escape from New York, Terminator, Robocop. All that stuff, Mad Max. We wanted an album cover that melded all of that with our music. A friend of ours, he came up with the initial design, the figure on the cover. Initially the design looked like we…
…possible to play to as many people as possible. When you are around twenty-eight, twenty-nine and you have this contract in front of you, this is your chance and the party will go on. That would have meant also we would have lost our day jobs, lost our families more or less because no wife could deal with this, being away for more than three hundred days a year. We knew from the first second on that this could be something that could last for two…
…at areas are you happiest about, and what needs to be improved in the short-term (or long-term) for the greater good of the genre as a whole? Miller: As a whole in the metal genre, in this generation we need to see a little bit more originality come into it. It seems like to me anyway, over the last five to ten years now there’s been a lot of cookie cutter bands coming up. They are doing well, a lot of them are making names for themselves and even…
…e put the song named “Ashen” in the middle of the album, an opener of the b-side on vinyl. It could be a natural finisher. Instead we put a song called “The Gallow’s Crossing” as the final track. Which is a bit more up-tempo, catchy kind of song with a long intro. We need to build the drama of an album. It’s almost like a movie, where you divide it into three parts or acts almost to keep the dynamics as strong as possible throughout the album. Dea…
…Rhetoric: The video for “Remnants of Technology” is amazing – almost a mini-movie paying homage to a lot of sci-fi film/television shows of the past. How did the idea and treatment develop – what type of budget did you work with, and do you believe you’ve gotten the type of response you desired from this clip? Scheuerer: Yes. We had the idea for this video lying around – two or three years almost. The basic idea, I had three years ago. I called ou…
…e thing. When you think about it, it’s actually a pretty big effort to self-release an album. You have to coordinate every little step. It’s really a work of art. I would say that I’m proud of the whole thing and how it pulled through from the beginning to the end. As far as being different from the other albums, I would say that the songs are maybe a bit more accessible, from the point of view of someone listening to my music for the first time….
…scene, and what the future holds. Dead Rhetoric: Helloween is the new self-titled record for the seven-piece outfit, and obviously highly anticipated. How did the songwriting and development take shape – as I’d imagine it wasn’t easy to incorporate all the ideas flying around to keep seven members with three singers and three guitarists happy? Sascha Gerstner: (laughs). That’s a lot of people, and there are a lot of opinions, of course. We’ve bee…
…u through. Dead Rhetoric: How have you handled this downtime with the COVID-19 pandemic beyond working on this record? And what do you think the live concert/festival market will look like once things are safe to get back to consistent shows? Frank: For me, it wasn’t much different. As I said, I’m in a lucky position that I have my own little studio, I worked most of the time on my own. The only bad thing was I couldn’t practice with the band that…
…decided to grab guitarist Iivo Kaipainen for a quick round of questions on Skype. We discuss the new album, evolution of the band, duets, and more. Dead Rhetoric: What are you most proud of with Vultures Die Alone? Iivo Kaipainen: I’m really proud that it is pretty far from the original sound we used to have when we released our first two albums, which were more power metal. I’m not saying power metal is bad, but this album sounds much more modern…
…But that means that we can really focus on what is important to us, touring-wise. So if we set aside a bit of our time, we could do a 3-week US tour. That would be right up there on our bucket list. We have family out there so it would be nice to see them as well. Gibbs: It’s crazy to think we have been a band for 17 years and never set foot into the US. It’s one of those things – it’s a hard nut to crack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LedOrh9Ao…
…heir debut when it came out. The Americans have a little bit more technique-wise, the German guys were really raw. Guitar-wise it’s more interesting, and that’s where the idea to form Septagon comes from. We are listening to the technical stuff but there’s still a lot of melody, and that’s what I always liked in my thrash metal. Nowadays people will tell me Septagon is not really thrash metal because you use a singer, he’s too clean. So I’m like,…
…veloped out of another thrash band Distillator that created an EP, two full-lengths, plus a split release with Space Chaser between 2013-2018. What circumstances took place to develop this new act, and where do you see the major shifts in terms of sound and style for this new band? Frank te Riet: In 2013 we started this band, we were teenagers and young students. We were typical thrash fans of bands like Exodus, Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth. We rea…
…pretty good, particularly in the recent years, especially with the last ten-eleven years since we did with Pretty Maids the Pandemonium album. My voice, it’s a clean voice and then I have this snarly, edgier, voice, rougher. I didn’t do anything in particular to take care of it, I’m a heavy smoker and had my share of alcohol. You have to change things up a little with age, and I had to adjust. I never took lessons, I am a self-made man. I have my…
