Brothers Of Metal

Brothers Of Metal
Let's Do A Song That Manowar Would Be Proud Of

23.03.2020

Архив интервью | Русская версия

For a newcomer band, playing true metal and earning attention seems very difficult these days, but Sweden’s Brothers Of Metal somehow managed to pull it off almost effortlessly. After self-releasing their debut album “Prophecy Of Ragnarok” (2017), the eight-piece (a drummer, a bassist, three guitarists and three singers!) quickly caught an eye of AFM Records, who re-released the record the following year, and it went all the way up from there. As of early 2020, the band has a successful second album out, they have completed a European tour with Elvenking, and are looking at more touring and more recording already this year. We reached out to singer Mats Nilsson to get more details about this success story.

You have just finished a tour with Elvenking. What are your impressions from it? What were the best moments and the worst moments?

First of all, it was so much fun, and the guys in Elvenking were great travel companions. The best moments are so many, it’s hard to just mention one. For me my personal highlight was probably the show at Pratteln, Z7, it was amazing. The worst moment was the scare in Paris – Pahr (Nilsson), our guitarist, got food poisoning. At first we thought that maybe he had caught some stomach flu, and we were so afraid that the whole bus would get it. But luckily he was bad for only a couple of hours, and then he was OK.

Many bands nowadays reduce their live line-up to save costs, some even play without a live bass player or without a live keyboard player and just use backing tracks instead. For Brothers Of Metal this was the first European tour, you’d never tried it before. Was it tough logistically-wise, or did you pull it through easier than you had thought?

It was way easier than expected, it wasn’t tough at all. The only tough part for us is during the planning. Several of the band members have kids and families and stuff, and all of us have regular jobs that we go to. The planning was the hardest part, but apart from that, there was no problem. Once we decided to go on the tour, everyone could join, there was no problem.

Your new album “Emblas Saga” was released at the beginning of the tour. When you did the first album, you were pretty much an unknown band, but this time a lot of people waited for the album because they liked the first one. Did you feel any kind of pressure when writing and recording songs?


I wouldn’t call it pressure, but as you said, we did the first album for ourselves, to have it recorded, with no intention of it to be heard by the whole world. (laughs) We didn’t plan on anything, we were just like, “Let’s record an album. We have enough songs”. With the second album, we knew that people would listen. That’s probably the biggest difference. But I wouldn’t call it pressure, we all thought it was great fun to record the album. I don’t think you should think too much of what other people think of your music, you should just focus on doing the music that you like, and then it becomes good.

Could you say a few words about the songwriting process in the band? On the second album there are no songwriting credits, but on the first album every song has quite a few songwriters – was it also the case this time?

Yeah, exactly the same. Most of the band are involved in writing the album, usually four to six people per song, that’s how it works. What usually happens is that one of the guys comes up with a rough idea for a song, and if others like it, we start working on the song and try to see what we can do with it and get everyone involved. We write them together as a team most of the time.

With three guitarists and three singers, is it difficult to agree on who sings which part or who plays a specific solo?

No. It’s really easy as well. Usually the guitarists talk about who wants to do what in each song, the rest of the band are not really involved in that, I would say. They split everything between them as they feel and want, and it’s basically the same with singers. We try to remove as much of our egos as possible, when we do that, and consider what’s best for a particular song. That’s usually how we do it, no other magic to it.

For those who are maybe not too familiar with Norse mythology, who is Embla? We’re asking because the actual lyrics of the song do not mention her name, it’s only in the title…


Embla is the first female. In Christianity you have Adam and Eve, the first humans created by God, and in Norse mythology you have Ask and Embla created by Odin and his two brothers. They… (laughs) it’s a very weird story all in all. What happens is Odin and his brothers kill a giant that is floating around in Ginungagap, that is just a big void, big black nothingness, and from the remains of this giant, they build our world, Midgard, the Earth. When they have built the Earth from the giant’s bones and flesh, they fill the world with life. They create this Ash and Elm, in English, and in Norsk it’s Ask and Embla. They’re made from two logs.

Where does your interest in Norse mythology come from? Are you specifically studying the subject by reading books or anything like that?


It’s our heritage. We learned about it in school at history lessons, there are even some cartoons that you watch as a kid, and so on. Yeah, we’re interested in it, especially me and Ylva (Eriksson), I would say, we read most of historical stuff before we write songs. We are studying that part of history, for sure.

Some of your mythological lyrics are light-hearted and funny, for instance, “Theft Of The Hammer”, but others, such as “Yggdrasil” are quite serious. We wonder do they come from different people in the band?

No, they’re actually from the same people. “Theft Of The Hammer” is quite a light-hearted story, it’s very humorous in the Poetic Edda, and we tried to preserve that. It’s also not so funny in the end, when Thor kills everyone, and there’s blood, blood, blood everywhere. (everybody laughs) Thor dresses up as Freyja, he puts on her wedding dress, that’s probably one of the first records of cross-dressing ever! He’s super-mad about it, because he hates the idea, but he still goes on with it together with Loki also dressed up as a maiden. We try to keep the fun in the lyrics as much as possible. We have some songs like “Yggdrasil” that you mentioned, we have “Weaver Of Fate”, we have “Hel”, songs that are not funny, but wherever we can, we try to sneak in a bit of fun. The world is serious enough, so let’s have some fun while we’re here – basically that’s our thought.

What do you think of this new wave of Nordic neofolk bands like Wardruna or Heilung, whose music is also rooted deeply in Scandinavian mythological subjects?


I actually went to see Wardruna last year… or was it 1.5 years ago? They played close by here in a venue called Dalhalla - it looks like an old mine, it’s basically a big hole in the mountain (laughs) – and it was so epic! They are doing amazing music, and if you’re into Norse mythology and all that kind of things, you need to watch them live. It’s pretty far from what we do, they are doing it way more authentically, using ethnic instruments and having super-cool choirs doing almost like Siberian throat-singing. It’s a totally different thing, I wouldn’t compare it to us at all, but it’s really inspiring to listen to.

Brothers of Metal come from Falun, which is also the home town of Sabaton and Twilight Force. Is there anything special about your town that so many great metal bands come out of it?


Yeah, I think it must be something in the water… or perhaps in the beer, I don’t know. (everybody laughs) Yeah, it’s so weird. I talked about it the other day with some guy from Canada as well. We have Sabaton, us, Twilight Force, Follow The Cipher, Civil War, Astral Doors… so many successful bands from this small town of like 40,000 people. For sure, metal is culturally strong here, but I don’t know where it comes from, it’s so weird and really impressive if you put it into a bigger scale. If you take New York with its 10 million people – and they don’t even have one decent metal band. Or maybe one or two, I don’t know, but you know what I mean. Compared to how many people live here, it’s really impressive that somehow this time managed to squeeze out at least six or seven metal bands. That’s pretty cool.

Are there any newcomer metal bands in your hometown?

Yeah, there are some young talents playing. I haven’t been listening too much to all newcomers, usually I see them at Sabaton Open Air or some local festivities where bands play. I haven’t seen a new one in maybe two years or so, but for sure there are youngsters playing the right music.

Before Brothers of Metal four of the bandmembers were playing together in a melodic death metal band called Tempory. But what were you personally doing musically before Brothers Of Metal? On Metal-Archives there is absolutely no information on your background…

I played in a punk band before, a very unknown band called Passarounders. This is the first metal band that I’ve ever played in, for sure. Ylva never even touched metal before either. Johan (Johansson, drums) played in a band called Revoked, it’s more like Amaranthe – a female singer, some growls, that kind of music. David (Grahn, guitars) also wasn’t in Tempory, he played in a couple of metal bands. All of us are childhood friends, we played together in different constellations over and out through our teenage years.

You mentioned that Ylva never sung metal before. Where does her voice come from? Has she ever studied music or singing professionally?

She has been singing her whole life. She is actually singing in another band called Good Harvest, and they have just released a new album. It’s more like First Aid Kit, singer-songwriter Americana style, with very nice vocal harmonies. It’s totally different to what she does in our band, and she enjoys that difference, because here you get to become a part of the act, you go into a role when you put on the leather outfit and go out on the stage.

In the very beginning, were Brothers Of Metal a complete vision of yours or somebody else in the band, or did the eight of you put it together and develop it gradually?

We put it together, the eight of us, there’s no master plan behind this. What happened was that one night… OK, let me back up even further. When we party, drink some beers and so on, what we usually do is go home to one of us that has a home studio, and we do music for the night, drink beer and just have fun. Usually we go like, “OK, let’s do a Beyonce song…” Oh, Beyonce is a bad example, because none of us can sing like Beyonce (everybody laughs), but you understand. It could be like, “Let’s do a Snoop Dogg song” or whatever that comes to our minds. That one night we decided, “Let’s do a song that Manowar would be proud of”. So we did “Son Of Odin” that night. Basically we did it, and at that point, as you mentioned, four of the guys were playing in a band called Tempory, but they had just lost their drummer, he moved to some different place and stopped playing drums. Joakim (Lindback Ericsson), the other male singer in Brothers Of Metal, got asked by a local club, “Can you play here with Tempory?” And he said, “No, sorry, we can’t at the moment, but we have this new project, maybe you can listen to this song”, and he sent them “Son Of Odin” without any of us knowing. They replied, “Yeah, you should play here in two weeks, you can play for 30 minutes”. Jokke said, “Yeah, OK, cool”, and then we had a problem, because we only had one song, and we were supposed to play for 30 minutes. (everybody laughs) We had to write five new songs in two weeks, all of which actually ended up on the first album, and after that it just kept going. People really enjoyed it when they saw us live, so we kept on playing small clubs here in Falun, and a couple of years later we were invited to play at Sabaton Open Air. That’s basically how it goes.

A great story! We read in an interview somewhere that the band members are doing their stage clothes on their own. Is that indeed the case? This must be a lot of difficult work to do…

Yeah. But after we did the “One” video and went on to do more for “Emblas Saga”, we actually found some people, among them Joakim’s brother, that are quite talented in doing leatherwork and so on. We asked if they wanted to make it if we pay them, and they accepted. They have more or less finished three costumes – mine, Ylva’s, and Jokke’s, and they’re working on the other guys’ clothing. Before that we did everything ourselves.

Speaking about videos - there is a guy called Willow who gets killed in quite a lot of them. Where you drawing inspiration from South Park here?

(laughs) Of course, after a while we thought, “This is exactly like Kenny in South Park”. But it wasn’t on our minds in the beginning. The first video we shot was for “Prophecy Of Ragnarok” with Patric Ullaeus, and we decided, “He should die, alright? Yeah, he should die”. So he gets an arrow to the chest. The day after we were shooting “Yggdrasil”, and we saw the footage of him dying and we thought it was so funny that everyone of us said, “He must die in this next video as well”. Then we just decided, “He must be in all our videos and die. That’s actually his thing - dying”. He’s actually the brother of one of our guitarists, Mikke (Fehrm), and he’s dying every time.

Speaking about inspiration – what band or album first made you want to play metal yourself?

I think I have to say that Iron Maiden and Pantera were my first connection to metal. My neighbor’s older brother had a record collection with all these vinyl records, and I remember the first time we got to listen to some of his records, I held “Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son” in my hands – “Wow, what the fuck is this?” I was so amazed by how it looked and loved the sound of it. That’s probably the first inspiration. And the first time I earned my own money - at 12 or 13 I did some small summer job when we were off school – the first thing I did was borrow a mailorder catalogue from a friend and order all CDs with Manowar in it. I was very much into metal as a kid, I started early.

Now you have a new album out, and you have completed a tour. What are the next steps for Brothers Of Metal? What are your plans for the rest of 2020?


We need to come to Moscow, right?

(everybody laughs) That was our next question! Sure you need to do it!

Moscow and St. Petersburg would be great to start with. We don’t have anything during the whole spring, and during summer we have festivals. And after the festival season we probably will continue writing the third album. Hopefully some time in the autumn, if we can make it work, we will go to Russia and Japan, but it’s not set in stone or anything. That would be a lot of fun, but I can’t yet promise anything, just keep an eye open on our Facebook page. And then we are working on our next tour, as we thought it was so much fun touring with Elvenking. For sure we can’t do what Sabaton are doing – one month in Russia, it’s not possible. I saw a poster – they start, I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s basically north of Japan, and they go through the whole Russia. It’s so big, the world’s biggest country, it’s humongous. But for sure it will happen, we just don’t know exactly when. We will try to make it there as soon as possible.

Brothers Of Metal on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brothersofmetalofficial/

Special thanks to Irina Ivanova (AFM Records) for arranging this interview

Interview by Roman Patrashov, Natalia “Snakeheart” Patrashova
Photos by Natalia “Snakeheart” Patrashova
February 11, 2020
© HeadBanger.ru

eXTReMe Tracker