Dark Tranquillity
Right To Be Different

20.02.2010

The history of melodic death metal was made by several bands, and two of them turned out to be most long-standing. The first ones are In Flames, who first did quite a few albums in the same vein and then dramatically leaped into metalcore, which aggravated many of their old fans and won them many ones. The other ones are Dark Tranquillity, who have been developing in the framework of the genre, creating a lot of good stuff which is still loved by many. Anyway, old school fans were definitely not enough to pack Moscow’s Tochka Club. And that’s the venue which hosted Dark Tranquillity’s second gig in town, before which we got hold of frontman Mikael Stanne for a not-so-brief conversation. Stylistic changes if the band, relations with fellows/competitors In Flames, details of the upcoming album “We Are The Void” and pre-history of Hammerfall – these are just some of the issues covered by Michael – friendly and in detail.

You said that your previous gig in Moscow was one of the five best shows in your entire career. In your opinion, what made it so great?

First of all, it was the first show in Russia which we did, and in fact, people were really going nuts. It was also a really cool venue, I really like this place. We were just so overwhelmed that people know about us here and can react to our music. You never really know what to expect, when you come to a new country, which we haven’t been to before. To see all this excitement and enthusiasm was really special to us. Most of the times gigs like that really stick in your head, because it’s for the first time, you go in with pretty much no expectations at all. In other places you go like, “Last time we were here, it was pretty good,” or “it was horrible”, but in this case you just go there, and everything turns on your head and becomes amazing.

Your latest release is also a live recording, it’s a DVD called “Where Death Is Most Alive”. In your home country it went to number one in the national DVD charts. What are your feelings about it? How much does this chart success matter for you?

For the band, it’s not that much. Of course it’s cool, but it really doesn’t make a difference. The positive thing, I guess, is that we’ve really caught people’s attention, plus, it makes all the distributors and stores buy it, because they know they’re gonna sell some extra units, and it’s a great thing. To us it means that we have a lot of fans in Sweden who go out and buy these DVDs rather than albums. People download the album and then they go out and buy the actual physical DVD. It has a cool package, and it’s a lot more content for the amount of money you spend compared to an album. I think it totally makes sense. Plus, we had a premier view, and it got incredible reviews in magazines, and that really helped us. It’s fucking cool!

The main show for the DVD was recorded in Milano, Italy. Why this particular place? It’s not common for metal bands to record DVDs in Italy, most bands do this in Germany or especially Poland…

Ever since the first time we went in Italy - it was in 1995 or something like that - we felt a special bond with the Italian audience. They have always treated us really well, they’ve always been fantastic every time we come in. It’s been one of those countries where it’s constantly really good. In some other countries we were going up and down, because people are kind of picky, but in Italy they’ve really stuck with us each year and each tour we’ve done. And then in 2004 or 2005 we played a show at that venue, and we were just blown away, so we said, “This is the perfect venue, the perfect crowd and everything, and next time we do a DVD, this is where we should do it.” Then we did this tour and we figured out, “This place is available, let’s shoot a DVD.” We brought in a Finnish company to shoot it from all places. It turned out amazingly well, and we love any second of it. For us it made a perfect sense. Quite many people ask us, why it is Italy, and we say, “Look at the DVD, look at the audience and you will get understand why we love it so much.”  

Nell from Theatre of Tragedy appeared on stage for two songs at that show. And she also sings on your latest studio album “Fiction”. How did you get her involved in the recording? Do you like the stuff she does with Theatre Of Tragedy?

Our keyboard player Martin (Brandstrom) also plays in Tiamat, and they toured with Theatre of Tragedy, so Martin knew her. And we knew of the band, of course, so when we needed female vocals for the “Fiction” album, we asked her and she said, “Yes, sure”. It was an amazing contribution to the album. We also figured out that she should come visit us every once in a while on stage if she has a chance. And we asked her for the DVD and she did it, and we did one other show in Oslo, where she is from. It was really awesome. I hope we can do some other time again. And I like what she does in the band, she is amazing, and Theatre of Tragedy is a really cool band.

There is a second DVD in the package, which contains a lot of early footage and even two songs dating back to 1991 which were never recorded in the studio. Why did that happen? Were you writing too much material in those days?

I guess so. We were really picky at that time, and actually we are pretty much the same right now. Yes, we wrote a lot of songs those days, and we felt that we grew really fast in terms of songwriting. You do one song, then the next one you feel is twice as good as the last one, then the next one is even better. You tend to throw away the first song you wrote because it doesn’t really fit, that’s the reason.  

Do you have some interesting memories from the times when the band had the name Septic Broiler?

(sighs) Yes, that was like the first six months of the band, when we rehearsed pretty much, every day from six to twelve hours. We just did nothing else, only a break for lunch and back to rehearsals again. It was pretty much like a day job.

Why did you get the name Septic Broiler, by the way?

Ah, it’s just a silly joke, when we were kids nearly 14 years old or something like that. I don’t know why, but it was one of those silly jokes we had in between us and no one else knew about. And in the beginning we didn’t really want to be a serious band at all, we just wanted to play the guitar and to have something to do because we were just bored out of our heads. We had nothing to do, we just sat around listening to music, collected demo-tapes and live albums, did tape trading with people from all over the world. And we were like, “Hey, let’s form a band, too, that will be cool, let’s have something to do”.

Over the past few years you have re-released a lot of early demos, various rare tracks and other interesting stuff. What about re-releasing the Septic Broiler demo, which the band recorded even before it became Dark Tranquillity? A lot of fans wander how it sounds like…

Our early demos were left out and probably for the good reason because they are just not that good, so…It wouldn’t make any sense. All the good old stuff we had was included in the DVD. For us it was really interesting to go back and listen to all these old tapes, we went like, “Oh, shit! How young and stupid we were! (laughs) What the hell were we thinking while we were writing these songs?! How did we come up with this stuff?” And we wanted the songs which no one had seen before, really rare stuff - songs that we never played, songs that we never recorded, or the songs which we rarely played live, perhaps once or twice or on short tours. It’s everything that was left out from the later parts of our career for some reason. For us it was a plus just to look through that stuff.

You will release a new album called “We Are The Void” in February next year. Some time ago you said that even though the basis of all songs was ready, the final result will still be a surprise to the listeners and to yourselves. Now that the recording is over, can you say what kind of surprise we should wait for?

I think the album is in a way more diverse, sometimes it goes into more extremes than before. It’s really heavy and aggressive in terms of melody, vocal and lyrical extremes that we haven’t touched more than before. I think it has a totally different tone to the whole album, a way more serious tone than anything we’ve done.  There is a feel or a vibe that runs through the entire album, and that’s what I like the most about it. It starts off in a way and ends the same way but it covers all the different aspects of that kind of mood, of that kind of setting over the span of 47 minutes. We played it to a couple of our friends and journalists, and you see them go like, “eah?!” but later they said “Oh, eh…that makes sense.” There are odd things in there that we felt were really different for us, and we weren’t really comfortable with it first. I guess, it’s a bit dangerous to find that comfort level when you go like, “Wow, this stuff is great, people will love it!” So we tried to push it a little bit further so that it wouldn’t be too comfortable. It had to be challenging and interesting to write and to play, there should be something that you haven’t done two thousand times before. It kind of keeps us on our toes.

Would you play any songs from the upcoming album tonight?

We will play one song, and it was just released on MySpace today, so you can actually listen to the studio version of it. We’re kind of previewing it, we’re trying it out, and this is gonna be the first time we ever play it live. We’ve just had a soundcheck, and that was the first time I ever sang it outside the studio. Everybody’s really nervous about it (laughs), but also excited, we can’t wait to play all these new songs in a live situation.

Aren’t you concerned that there may be different reactions to it from the fans?

I’m looking forward to it. The song that we’re doing is very different from our previous albums, when people hear it they go like, “Wow, where are you guys going, what’s the direction? Does the rest of the album sound like this?” I go like, “Well, no…” It’s an interesting first cut from the album, it shows that we have developed. And it’s an awesome song that everybody’s proud of.

The new album was recorded in the home studios of Daniel Antonsson (bass) and Martin Brandstrom (keyboards). I understand that it’s comfortable to record there, but at the same time, many bands want to have an outside view on their material so they get a sound engineer or a producer who is not a member of the band. What can you say about the advantages and disadvantages of recording in your own studios?

We didn’t do the whole work in one studio, we did the drums and bass in Daniel’s studio, and the rest of the parts were recorded in Martin Brandstrom’s studio. Since we spent so much time working on these songs, we became so close to it, it becomes something you think about 24 hours a day for a year. So the notion that we would have someone else come in and say, “Mmm, let’s change this and that!” and interfere – it doesn’t work for us. I don’t think we’re open to the seventh person. This is pretty much the way we’ve always done it. On some of the previous albums we worked with Fredrik Nordstrom at Fredman Studios, but most of the time we’re kind of left alone to do our thing, and someone else comes in for the mix. That’s pretty much it. Of course, that’s not the only way to go, but that’s most natural for us. And we do pretty much the whole producing and everything ourselves. We feel really happy that we don’t really need an outsider to touch it. What comes out is exactly the way we want it to sound. If we had someone else with us, we would probably get another prospective on the songs and that would make the songs more accessible to people, or kind of broader in a sense, more commercially acceptable. But it’s not what we are about. We started the band so that we could write great music that we can be proud of it. And this is what we still do, we never have to compromise outside of ourselves, the compromise within six of us is it pretty much, and I really like it. This is what makes me proud, that’s something we take great care to keep and never give in to an outside opinion.

Last year you recorded a cover version of the song “Broken” by Sentenced. Why did you chose this track, do you like Sentenced, and what do you think about the way they chose to end their career?

I am a big fan of the band and I have been ever since their first album. We signed our first record contract so that we could be on the same record label as Sentenced, because we were huge fans. We toured together many times and we were really good friends with the guys. It just made total sense when Century Media put together this cover album where Century Media bands cover other Century Media bands, and we could choose Sentenced - because they were the ones who kind of influenced us a lot in the beginning. They’ve been an inspiration throughout the years, because they’re really cool and they had a great sense of melody and they shared a lot of sensibilities with us, so we got along really well.

I think it made sense when I head that they were quitting, and I understood why. They couldn’t really work it out anymore, it didn’t work on the interpersonal level. I think it’s kind of cool – you go out on a highlight, you go out on a high note, and you just go like, “This is it.” You do the final album, you do the final shows and a farewell tour instead of just fading out. They had a really intense kind of style, so it made sense to me. As to Miika (Tenkula, guitarist, who passed away in February 2009 – ed.), that was kind of inevitable, I guess, even though it’s very sad. He always had problems, so it’s something that was bound to happen sooner or later, though it obviously happened a little bit too soon.

What is your former bass player Michael Nicklasson now doing? Did he quit music altogether, or is he playing in any other bands?

I honestly don’t know. He was in a band called Lavett some time ago, and then he quit, but I don’t know why. I really don’t know what he is doing right now, I haven’t talked to him for a while. I met him a couple of weeks ago, but…He’s definitely looking for something or he’s already found it. He likes to work, he loves playing and doing shows, and obviously he’s gonna keep doing it. It just didn’t work between us.

Your new bass player is Daniel Antonsson, but most of the people know him as a guitarist, for instance, for the album he did with Soilwork. How did he end up playing bass in Dark Tranquillity?

We have known each other since we were very young. He was in the band called Pathos, and we had shows together in the early 1990s. And since he has lived in the city as long we have been in the band, we were always on hand. He was always doing something else, but we hanged out, we had common friends and so on. Later he joined Soilwork for a while and we toured together like two years ago, and it was a lot of fun. And when Mikael quit, we started to search for a new bass player. We searched all over the place, we had a lot of applications and stuff like that, but one day Daniel called and said, “I was kicked out of Soilwork, can I join you, guys?” And immediately we said, “Of course!”. We didn’t have to think about it for a second. It just made total sense to us, because we get along so well and we have known each other for a long time. He said, “I’m looking forward to play bass instead of a guitar”. He’s a great guitar player, he really understands bass as well, and he sees it like a challenge to do something new. And he has always been a fan of the band, so it just made perfect sense. He actually wrote most of the new song that we’ll play tonight, that’s why it is a bit different.

You will be touring the USA next year with Killswitch Engage, who obviously borrowed a lot from the Swedish melodic death metal sound of the late 1990s. But lately many European melodic death metal bands are borrowing from American metalcore bands. Have you ever been tempted to add some metalcore stuff to your music, like Soilwork did, for instance? What do you think about this genre of music?

I’m not a big fan, and no one in the band really is a big fan of the metalcore or hardcore scene, and that has never been our thing. We are into more traditional death metal and melodic heavy metal. I like the extremes, but I don’t really care much for heavy music that is heavy just for the sake of being heavy. I need some kind of melody, some substance, you know. That is what’s lacking in hardcore - for me at least. That’s just not my thing. In metalcore, there are some bands that are cool, Killswitch Engage is one of my favorite bands in the genre. They really pull it off, they have really heavy stuff but they have a really melodic side to it. I think they’re awesome, that’s why we decided to do this tour. I hope that it’s going to be a lot of fun, we toured together before. But it’s a bit weird - this kind of cross influences. At the same time, there’s nothing new, we did that ourselves. When we started out, we wanted to sound like Deicide, Morbid Angel and Testament or Metallica or all those American bands. We just incorporated some of our early influences, like German speed metal, into our music, and it became whatever the hell we do now. There are also many American bands that are listening to Swedish bands, so this is the whole fucking crazy metal world.

What do you think about In Flames’ new style? People still say that you are kind of competitors…

(laughs) They totally sold out after their first album – that’s my opinion! Seriously, they are really good friends of mine, we’ve been friends forever. I love their stuff, they are really great, they’ve progressed and changed over the years. I totally understand when people go like, “Oh, I love their old stuff and I don’t like the new one”. I’m totally like that to a lot of my favorite bands. At the same time, they have taken artistic liberties that I think are really cool, they’ve progressed their music into something that is way more accessible to people, which has totally worked out. They do really well, and I think it’s awesome. I can be like a metal nerd and go like, “Never change, be the same,” but at the same time, I’m all for bands who change and do whatever they want. In Flames just chose to go the path that more people like, and I’m all for it.   

How do you now assess your experimental albums “Projector” and “Haven”? Do you think you went too far with them?

No, no, you can never know before! At the time people thought we were going way too far. I don’t think we did at all, but perhaps it was too early, it was hard for a lot of people to accept it that you do something different. But for us it was just one of those absolutely necessary things. We felt like there’s no way out of this stuff, we felt like we had written ourselves into a smaller genre than we started out in. All of a sudden everybody started talking about this Gothenburg style, sound or whatever, and to us that just seemed like a fucking prison, we were like, “Ah, is that all we are, is that it?” The reason we started writing the music that was different was so that we could branch out and use all of our different influences and create something original from that. So when people started saying, “Oh, they’re just another Gothenburg death metal band,” it was really insulting to us because we tried our best to be quite the opposite. For us it was just time for something new. We were pretty dramatic about that as well, “We’re gonna change everything and start from scratch.” And that’s what we did, it was just necessary. And now, after those kind of experiments we could be way more comfortable doing what we pretty much set out to do – to make progressive melodic music. And of course you are learning a lot from doing different things like that.

You were a member of Hammerfall before the band got signed to Nuclear Blast and gained global recognition. Have you ever regretted quitting Hammerfall so early? How would have Hammerfall developed if you had stayed there?

I absolutely don’t regret it, at that time it was just for fun. We had one show every year for, I think, two three or years, and that was pretty much it. We never did anything else, we just wrote a few songs and did a few cover songs. It was just because Oscar (Dronjak, guitarist) is such a die-hard heavy metal fan, and he was playing in death metal bands at that time, so he needed some outlet for his heavy metal needs. For me it was pretty much the same, and also for Jesper (Stromblad, guitar, now with In Flames) and Nicklas (Sundin, guitar, now with Dark Tranquillity), who were in the band at that time. It was so much fun to go all-out with heavy metal. At that time no one played heavy metal, traditional heavy metal was pretty much dead. When we did shows people were just laughing at us, they said, “Haha, it’s stupid, it’s just for fun,” but we were really serious about it. Oscar was definitely dead serious about it. And there was a rock competition, and we got to the semifinals, and at the date of the semifinals I had to go on tour. That’s why they started looking for a new singer and they found Joacim (Cans). It worked out, they told me about it and I said great, it didn’t matter to me. It was never serious for me any more, I was not a huge heavy metal fan like that, I am into more extreme stuff, I guess. But at the time it was amazing. I love the way they progressed, they really made it, and they made it big. At the beginning everybody hated them, “What the fuck are you doing?” And all of a sudden they became a huge band, it was so unexpected and amazing. I’m all for it!

Can you tell us something about the band Slaughter of the Bluegrass? Do you plan to play with them more often in the future?

I don’t really know them that well, I know one of the guys a little bit. I heard they did an At The Gates cover something like a year ago, I heard it on the Internet, and I was like, “Holy shit, this is the most amazing stuff ever!” Then they had a poll on their website, (www.slaughterofthebluegrass.se) – “What’s the next song we should cover?” with several alternatives, and “Punish My Heaven” was one of the alternatives. It quickly got to number one, it was the most requested song, so they started rehearsing and they said it was the hardest thing they’d ever done, they just got crazy with it. Then I heard it, I was just blown away – it’s amazing, it has such a cool arrangement, it sounds so awesome and so different, this is like the best cover version ever. We asked them if they could play live as the opening act, we had this premiere of the DVD in Gothenburg. They said, “Oh no, we’ve never played live, this is just a studio experiment.” But I asked them once again and they were like, “Fuck, perhaps we could pull it off.” And they actually did – they started rehearsing and got some extra members, and they came down and did an amazing appearance. It’s all over YouTube and you can watch it. Hopefully they can do it once again, I would love it.    

How are you going to spend New Year holidays? Do you celebrate Christmas?

I am going to celebrate the Christmas pretty much the same way as I always do, with my family. It’s gonna be really nice, I’m gonna be cooking for two days straight, which I look forward to. And then I leave on Christmas day, we start touring. We will play every day in between Christmas and New Year, so I’ll be home on New Year’s Eve, and then I’m gonna party with my friends - a huge party, which I’ll probably need after a week of touring, I’ll be a wreck. After that we will have a month off when we will just relax and rehearse our stuff, preparing for touring and the release of our new album.

It’s gonna be really intense – I’ll be home for one day before Christmas, so I have a lot of stuff to do. Next year is going to be incredibly crazy, we’re gonna be touring pretty much constantly from February and on. The album is coming out, and hopefully it’s gonna be successful. I am happy that we’re doing this now, it feels really great. For us it feels like the last show in support of the “Fiction” album, and also kind of the start of a new touring season. We haven’t done any shows in a long time because we were recording the album, and we were stuck in the studio. But finally we’re out and about to do this stuff again, and I’m happy. And it’s cool to be back here, I love this place, and hopefully we will do an even crazier show than the last time.

Dark Tranquillity on the Internet: http://www.darktranquillity.com

Special thanks to Vera Dmitrieva (Spika Concert Agency) for arranging this interview

Interview by Viktoria “Ewigkeit” Bagautdinova, Dmitry “Ward” Kulikov
Questions also compiled by Roman “Maniac” Patrashov
Photos by Dmitry “Ward” Kulikov
December 18, 2009
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