Formed in 2005 by teenagers Jan-Ole Lamberti (guitars) and Volker Dieken (guitars), Nailed To Obscurity went through the usual ups and downs as a band. The Germans took their name from a song off Hate Eternal’s debut album, Conquering The Throne, but that’s another story for another time. Mere months after forming, Nailed To Obscurity issued their first demo, Our Darkness. Certainly, line-up shifts were part of the progression as a band, but Lamberti and Dieken -the band’s primary songwriters -pushed on, with Jann Hillrichs (drums) and Carsten Schorn (bass) forming the rhythmic foundation.While most bands live and die on the possibility of signing a label deal, Nailed To Obscurity persevered, releasing their debut album, Abyss, independently in 2007. By the time, the group ushered in Opaque in 2013 and King Delusion in 2017 -both for German independent Apostasy Records -they were a different band entirely. Burial Vault vocalist Raimund Ennenga had replaced Alexander Dirks in 2012, and the rest, at least for the present, is history.
Nailed To Obscurity are about to release their new album, ‘Black Frost’, their first for Nuclear Blast Records so we caught up with Jan-Ole Lamberti to discuss the new songs and much more.
Steve: Hi Ole how’s everything with you guys?
Jan-Ole: Yeah everything is fine, we are doing a lot of interviews (laughs). A lot of interesting things are happening for us right now.
Steve: Great I bet you can’t wait for the new album to come out?
Jan-Ole: Yeah especially with such a big label now it feels great to work on that release and also the same day the album is released we will start a huge European tour. Two big things we really can’t wait for,
we are playing for 5 weeks with Amorphis, Soilwork and Jinjer all over Europe so that will be a great great tour.
Steve: That will be awesome fun!
Jan-Ole: Yeah for sure!
Steve: So what would be your favorite song from the new album “Black Frost” and why?
Jan-Ole: Oh that is a hard question (laughs). If I’m honest I don’t really have a favorite even though they fit together, they are all different from one another and they all have their own characters. There are certain things I like about every song, it’s hard to pick a favorite but I think the title track “Black Frost” has a really catchy upbeat chorus but on the other hand “Tears Of The Eyelss” has all these clean vocals and “Road To Perdition” has this more aggressive side I would say, I really can’t pick.
Steve: That’s ok I myself really like the title track “Black Frost” with it’s almost tribal drum sound.
Jan-Ole: Yeah I like that also, it’s a bit of a different approach to start a song I guess.
Steve: Absolutely so I notice that last year’s album “King Delusion” was quite short with eight tracks and this album has seven tracks so was this a follow on from recordings you’ve had previously or was this a fresh start in terms of material?
Jan-Ole: Well actually we didn’t want to repeat ourselves and we tried to forget all of our past albums for a moment just to focus on new songs without trying to copy ourselves. There were some left over ideas from “King Delusion” and we checked them because we didn’t remember everything that we wrote that was left over from that process so we came to the conclusion there are some cool ideas but it’s not what we want to do with this album. If we didn’t warm up to those ideas then why should we use them now? It’s always been fresh, we never use old ideas. We sometimes make fun of ourselves because we have written way, way more music in the history of the band then we have ever released, the idea’s we don’t use is actually way more then the music we have released but that’s how we work. It has to feel right when we release or create a song even though there are some good ideas. We didn’t use them because they didn’t fit on the album, they didn’t sound like what we want the band to sound like so we just skip those ideas and move to others that we feel more comfortable with.
Steve: Sure I understand, the reason I asked was that I’ve spoken with bands before and they say that there were some left over ideas from last time that they didn’t get to use so I was just interested to get your perspective on it.
Jan-Ole: Yeah that’s definitely not the case, the reason why that there are only seven or eight songs is because they are pretty long and we think everything that’s over fifty minutes can be too long. The play time that this album has feels right to us, of course it can be longer and the limited edition of this album will have three bonus tracks so it will be over an hour but it’s just re-recordings of old songs so not new songs. I think for some people it might be too long if it’s fifty minutes or more than an hour, I’d rather keep it short. It’s better if people think, ‘Oh it’s over, I have to listen to it again’ rather than, ‘Oh I’m bored, I don’t want to listen until the end’ (laughs).
Steve: Sure and I suppose from a live perspective it’s time constraint as well?
Jan-Ole: Yeah when we play live we have the problem that our songs are too long because if we are at a festival and we only have fourty minutes playing time or even thirty minutes it’s really hard to build a set in this short time because if you go over time and you have to skip a song there are already eight minutes missing (laughs). It’s a challenge sometimes but normally it works out, for this coming tour we have to ask for five minutes more otherwise we wouldn’t be able to play a proper setlist.
Steve: So it’s almost like an epic novel! (laughs). So I’ve done some research on you guys and you are pigeonholed for lack of a better term, as German death metal. I personally see it a little differently, how would you describe your sound to someone who hasn’t heard your music before?
Jan-Ole: Well even for us it’s hard to find a genre that we fit into. Our roots are in the death metal scene, we are normally called melodic death metal or death/ doom metal, I think it’s a mixture of all of that but it makes it difficult to choose one of these genres which I think is a good thing. Normally when people ask me to describe it I say if you get some old Opeth, Katatonia, Paradise Lost and some new Katatonia, all that together if you like, all those bands, the older or newer albums, depending which band it is, then you might like us. That’s how I always put it because you can’t just say one genre and people will know how we sound, that doesn’t work for us.
Steve: Sure for me it’s a real mixed sound of aggressive then it eases off the pedal then goes melancholic then just when you’re relaxed, it’s back on the pedal and away we go again (laughs).
Jan-Ole: Yeah and I think these dynamics are really important and that’s normally why the songs are that long because if you have so many ups and downs so to speak you need to give those certain aspects of the song time to create an atmosphere and if we did the same thing in shorter songs, I think it would sound really hectic. But you are right, there is a lot of dynamics and ups and downs within the songs.
Steve: Absolutely you could never be accessed of being a grindcore band! (laughs).
Jan-Ole: We don’t want to actually! (laughs).
Steve: No of course!
Jan-Ole: The scene where we come from, where we live, some of us anyway are in the countryside and there are no bigger cities near by so the next big city which isn’t that big is one hundred kilometres from where we rehearse. But there is a strong metal scene there, it’s really extreme. They are all into brutal death metal and grindcore so I’ve seen countless grindcore shows years ago and I can’t stand it anymore. I still enjoy some grindcore but most of the bands I saw back then weren’t very good! (laughs).
Steve: So when it comes to writing are you the kind of band that goes in with something in particular in mind or do you hit record and let it flow. How does that work for you guys?
Jan-Ole: I think it’s a mixture of both of these words. We start writing the songs at a pretty early stage, we always start writing together as a duo. Me and the other guitarist (Volker Dieken) sit together, actually we have to sit together and of course he has his own ideas when he’s jamming around at home, he collects idea’s and I do the same but we create the ideas together because I don’t know if you’ve noticed that but normally there’s two different guitars playing at the same time so we don’t play the same riff at the same time. It’s always the one guitar plays a variation of the rhythm guitar or picking guitar or lead guitar over the actual rhythm guitar so that’s why we have to sit together because we see the two guitars as one instrument. Like a piano for instance where you have two hands, the one hand is playing the rhythm part and the other hand is playing the melody part so that’s how we see the guitars as one instrument as opposed to having two guitars playing the same riff just to get a fatter sound (laughs).
So that’s how we create the main ideas for the songs and we also talk about ideas, how to use a certain riff or melody and what to build around it. So that’s the main idea and the foundation of a song so to speak, then we take that into the rehearsal room, then we write on these ideas together as a band. We don’t record things at home and send to each other and everybody does his part, we are together in the rehearsal room playing these ideas together and seeing how the sounds develop, then sometimes one of the band members has an idea so we try that then it’s good or it’s not so the songs are growing in the rehearsal room. A lot of ideas just come from jamming around and because we are not living close together I have to drive six hundred kilometres for one rehearsal, everyone has to drive more than one hour to get to the rehearsal room. We can only meet up on the weekends from February to August, when we went into the studio we met every weekend and we didn’t do anything but write songs together.
It’s important to us because when we write songs we get immediate feedback, we feel how it feels to play the song and if it’s the right tempo or it’s the right direction the right atmosphere, we feel that together and there is instant feedback. If we didn’t do it like that the music would be completely different so that’s why it’s important to us and even though we prepare over a long period of time, we never go into the studio with one hundred percent finished songs. The songs are only one hundred percent complete and finished when they are recorded so what we did this time was the first time we ever did that, we went into the studio for one week six weeks before we recorded the album at the same studio just to work on the songs again. So Volker Dieken (guitarist) and I and our producer and Raimund Ennenga (vocalist) joined later so we could work out some clean vocals melodies and harmonies, so we went into the studio for a week just to work on them even more and do the pre production. There, that’s how the whole process works for us.
Steve: What an amazing journey! It’s been great speaking with you today, I really appreciate your time. I definitely hope that you guys can head to Australia at some point?
Jan-Ole: Thank you so much and we hope we can come to Australia some day. It’s on the plans but I don’t know how realistic it is.
Steve: Fingers crossed!!
Jan-Ole: For sure, cheers!
Black Frost is out January 11th through Nuclear Blast and available on iTunes
