Celebrating twenty years together as a band, German thrash act Eradicator unleashes their sixth studio platter for The Paradox. The quartet incorporates influences past and present to keep things fresh, as dynamics with melodies and shifting tempos matter just as much as speedy, fast, or aggressively driven riffs. We got the chance to speak with guitarist/vocalist Sebastian Stöber about his early musical memories that got him playing the guitar, deep thoughts on the new album and where they wanted to take their songwriting this time, complex thoughts on knowledge, questions, and answers relating to the lyrics, favorite thrash albums and a couple of underrated German acts to check out, the healthy status of the movement these days, plus future plans.
Dead Rhetoric: What are some of your earliest memories surrounding music growing up in childhood? At what point did you start listening to heavier forms of music – and eventually gain the interest in picking up an instrument to perform in bands?
Sebastian Stöber: I think back and the first thing that comes to mind is I was on a ferry here in our village, and I got my hands on a toy guitar, an air guitar that you pump up with air. I had that on my wall in my childhood room. One day we were watching tv, my father, my mother, my brother and I and there was this movie Crossroads with Steve Vai. There was this crazy guitar battle in the end, and I remember this was the day I wanted to pick up the electric guitar and play music. I enjoyed guitar playing very much – my father then put on the first Van Halen record with “Running With the Devil” and “Eruption” in the beginning, it had a great impact on me. Eddie Van Halen was my guitar hero. We heard a lot of music as children, because our parents liked music, live music, played songs on the stereo. I heard German punk rock in the early days, a raw attitude. It all started for me to be an electric guitar player.
My parents bought me my first electric guitar and I started to play. In the beginning, I was crazy for it. I learned and played three to five hours a day, that was crazy. Shortly before I got that guitar, my father had an old electric bass, he thought I was not ready to play an instrument, so he brought up the bass guitar and gave it to me. I still have it. I worked on that instrument, and saw it was something that interested me a lot. So, he saw that it was time for me to own my own guitar and learn how to play.
My first guitar teacher had a big influence on me in a way. I remember he was also a big Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin fan, but he also introduced me to heavier stuff. I remember that he had a Megadeth record – So Far, So Good, So What – and he lent it to me. It was a time when you burned it or ripped the songs, I was playing that album a lot. This opened a heavier world to me. Our bass player in the band brought some music to me, we’ve been friends since kindergarten. We enjoyed music together; it was a world we discovered together. Metallica – Kill ‘Em All, Slayer – South of Heaven, he introduced me to those two albums, and we started to discover and explore this heavier, more aggressive form of extreme heavy metal.
Dead Rhetoric: The Paradox is the sixth album for Eradicator. How do you feel about the songwriting and recording sessions – were there any specific aspects that you wanted to emphasize or expand upon this time around compared to previous efforts?
Stöber: What’s really important for us as a band is we don’t want to stay the same all the time. We want to emerge or develop, but not that we want to force it. It’s more like if there is something new, we discover for ourselves during the songwriting process, we let it happen. We listen to it as a band, and then we decide if it fits the band’s sound or not. If we like it, then it becomes an Eradicator song. With this album, it’s something special because it’s not only our sixth album which is a lot, but also our twentieth anniversary album. It was really important that the album will be released this year. We wanted to make it a special album, to show the variation of sound this band can come up with. Not just the heavy and fast thrash metal, maybe allow some more clean influences, it may be a little risky. For the first time we started a song with clean guitars, it’s directly the opening track of the record. We allowed this when we came up with the ideas.
The songwriting process, it’s not something we do at the rehearsal room, it’s something that we do when we are sitting at home. We work on our ideas and present them to the others. Then we work on them together and work on the specific ideas, just demo them, and let’s see what are the best ideas that come out of that to make an album. We wrote 12 or 13 songs, and we work on them to drop two of them. We did hold one song back to maybe release in the future, as we did on the last album. We started recording and producing the album with Sebastian ‘Seeb’ Levermann of Orden Ogan, who did the last record with us. We did the guitars on our own, acoustic and electric, bass and leads. We needed to record the drums in a professional studio. This is what Seeb did really well for us. He also reamped the guitars in the studio – but he didn’t have much impact on the ideas, more on the sound and production of the album. We just needed then to do the vocals, I demoed that all on my own in a home studio to get rudiments of the melody lines. I put a lot of time into this this time, I discovered this kind of death metal vocals that I did not use on earlier albums. Seeb made me discover this deep voice, he said he needed something deeper for a second layer in the back, to make the choruses bigger. I just tried it, I never had before, and I believe it was there. This was during the process of the last record we recorded. This time because I really liked how my voice sounded, I tried to put more into this record with the death metal style of vocals. It gives the band a new set of sounds, making it even more variant and special.
The story behind the recording process. We tried to make appointments to record the vocals. Around Christmas we had free time available. Unfortunately, Seeb and I were ill, and could not record. Orden Ogan went on tour, so we had no time to do this together, I had the idea to record the vocals with Jörn Michutta, who recorded and produced our first three records, who lives nearby and is a good friend. They know how to work together; we did this together and it was something special too to go back to our roots. That was something special too for me.
Dead Rhetoric: You mention in the background information for the new record that a lot of the lyrical themes reflect the dichotomy and ambivalence of human action and thought – which reflects current times while viewing your task as stimulating the discourse. Could you delve a little deeper into these struggles humans are dealing with in today’s society – do you believe this is a direct result of all the turbulence and turmoil going on, or other factors at play?
Stöber: Let me think about this a little bit, because it’s complex. On the one side of the coin, all the knowledge is available on your smartphone, your computer that you have in your pocket. If you put a little effort into things, you can learn in school, in university, and the internet if it’s from the right sources. It’s hard to tell though which ones are the right sources. The world is getting more complex, and all the people seem to search for really simple answers to all these complex questions. To me, this is how history was all the time, people searching for answers to really simple questions because complexity can drag you down.
It’s hard with all this knowledge available and people discussing (things) everywhere to trust simple questions, but also trust simple answers. And understand the complexity of the more difficult answers. The people are overstrained with this complexity, and I think this is the brave paradox, like the album title that is going on. We have all this knowledge available, more in our history than ever, but we are still searching for the simple questions and answers. It’s one of the paradoxes that are issues I talk about with the lyrical themes on this record.
Dead Rhetoric: Cripper guitarist Christian Bröhenhorst once again did the cover art for this record, whom you’ve worked previously with for 2018’s Into Oblivion. How did the concept and process work this time around?
Stöber: It’s really easy and very fun to work with Christian. He is a really nice guy. We wanted to get to work with him again, he did the Into Oblivion record for us, and he did a bunch of t-shirt designs for us in the past. We came up with the idea with this strange animal put together with chimera, classical design. We talked about making it more of a character that is something of our own – not the classic character, but elements new to it. Another head, and something like that, the horns. It has this inside out print on this rough paper; you can feel it. I wanted to connect it with a mystical atmosphere, like on the first track on the record, I tried to write it in the style of H.P. Lovecraft, with all those Ktulu references. I think Christian did things well with the background, the seaside with boats in the front which are smashed down by this monster. You see the sea birds in the background forming a mystical atmosphere. We wanted to make it a little easy in terms of not too much color, to go away from this comic style that we had on the last album.
Dead Rhetoric: Musically the band seem to balance a mix of second-generation Bay Area influences of the late 80s/early 90s with a lot of the finesse and power of your own domestic German heritage. What qualities do you believe are essential to make an ideal Eradicator track at this point?
Stöber: Thanks, that’s a compliment to me that mixture that you said. I like different styles of thrash metal. The obvious heroes of the Bay Area are our heroes and models in making music. A few I already mentioned, as well as the second wave like Testament and Death Angel – they have a great impact on my style of playing and I enjoy a lot. Both bands are still relevant today and still putting out great albums. It’s nice to be connected to these bands. The German heroes of the scene, we just attended the big Teutonic Four show a few weeks ago which unfortunately was cancelled after half of the set of Kreator. It was Tankard, Kreator, Sodom, and Destruction playing in front of 7,000 people at an amphitheater.
What makes an Eradicator song a typical ‘Eradicator’ song? We try not to copy off our own style or other bands. It’s really hard, because every riff was already written by Tony Iommi (laughs) – and we just revisit those riffs. A lot about the songwriting for Eradicator is about dynamics. We are not the band that wants to define the sound just with speed or heaviness. We allow all these influences and elements into our songwriting. There is not much speed in a song if you are just thrashing it at 240 BPM all the time – having four-minute songs going fast all the way. If I write a song, I’m bored by just doing the fast stuff. When I am doing a fast part, I feel about where to slow things down and do another heavy riff so that the next fast part is even more effective. That is something that comes naturally in my songwriting and Sebastian Zoppe our bassist’s songwriting. We write all the songs, and we have different ways to write a song, but we have the same claim and attitude. We have the same vision in mind when we think of a new song. We want to make it something that is still relevant and bring new elements to our sound.
Dead Rhetoric: Where do you see the state of thrash metal currently? Do you see distinct differences between the appeal of the old school guard versus the newer generation of acts – and what would you like to see happen to keep the movement alive in the coming years?
Stöber: It will stay alive forever, hopefully, because it’s just the raw spirit of metal that manifests itself in thrash metal. It’s stripped down to the things you really need in the songwriting or metal performances. Drums, bass, one or two guitars, and a vocalist – and that’s everything. The rest of it is the attitude and the performance of the band, what comes from these four or five musicians. This is something you cannot erase from the scene.
When we started with the band in 2004, if you look back from 2004 twenty years, you were in 1984. It was the time when Metallica put out their first album, Exodus didn’t have their first album out. Now it’s like the third or fourth incarnation of thrash metal. What comes to your mind when you think of the new wave of thrash metal scene? We emerged from that in the middle of the 2004-06, the Exodus reunion and Testament reunions happened, and a new thrash generation that are putting more blackened thrash style into things. It’s still alive, and thrash will be alive twenty more years into the future.
Dead Rhetoric: What do you consider three of the most important thrash records in your collection – and what’s an underrated band or two in the genre that you believe people need to spend more time investing in and appreciating?
Stöber: That’s a tough question. The classics are my favorite. The three albums I come back to all the time – Rust in Peace – Megadeth, Never, Neverland – Annihilator, and Seasons in the Abyss – Slayer. These are three albums which are different, all the time when I listen to them, they inspire me to pick up my instrument and have fun playing the songs or write new songs. I’ll name two German underground bands you have to listen to – the first is a little more known called Hatred, southern Germany. Their first official record Madhouse Symphonies is a really amazing record. They did a reunion last year, and more shows are coming up. When I listened to that album in 2009, it blew my mind, I really loved it. It combines a lot of the sounds from those three albums. The other one is a lesser-known band, but we’ve played some shows with from Dortmund called McDeath. They have two records, but at the moment I don’t think they are playing shows anymore. Shout out to Thorsten (Lipiensky) the vocalist and lead guitar player, he’s a really cool guy. I met him at the Rock Hard festival this year. They have two records – the first one is Spit of Fury, and the second one is Lord of the Thrash. If you can get ahold of one of those records, check it out.
Dead Rhetoric: What’s on the agenda for anything related to Eradicator over the next twelve months as far as promotion, shows, festivals, tours, etc.? Are you hopeful to hit new countries / territories tour-wise for this record?
Stöber: We did a lot of booking for the upcoming half of the year. We have 14-15 shows scheduled this year, it’s an anniversary tour while we also promote the new album. We are rehearsing the new songs and looking forward to playing them live. We’ve played two songs from the new album already live; we will bring more new songs to the stage. We play on the weekends, we have normal jobs – we are weekend warriors, but really enjoy it. We have some shows for next year that are not yet officially released. Last year, we did a tour with our friends Solitary from the UK, we did four shows together in Germany in one week. In October of 2023 we did four shows in the UK, that was an amazing experience. We will try to make this happen again in the future. Keep an eye on our tour dates.