After the release of Verkligheten which came out earlier in the year, Swedish veteran metal act Soilwork return to Australia this month to showcase the new sounds of the band. A regular to Aussie shores, fans are keen to hear the new stuff live along with the classics so we caught up with guitarist David Andersson to talk about the tour as well as the new side of the band and what the future holds.
Andrew: So hows things with you and the rest of the guys in the band?
David: I can’t speak for the rest of them but I’m fine!
Andrew: You guys have been busy touring a lot so far this year?
David: Yeah and we’re living quite spread out all over Europe so we don’t see each other much between tours and stuff but I think they’re good! We’re in constant contact through emails and they seem to be healthy and good shape and excited about the upcoming Australia and Japan tour.
Andrew: Yes obviously we were meant to see you back in March earlier this year but it got postponed unfortunately so we are very excited to still be able to see you coming back to Australia again. So you had a new album that came earlier in the year and Soilwork is quite well known to Australian fans as you have been regulars here over the years so what can we expect this time? Will you be playing a lot of the new material?
David: Yeah I guess our setlist will be a mix of old and, I guess we do have a few classics that we are almost obliged to play, and we’re pretty much focusing on the album. I guess the last 3 albums are like the new Soilwork, Soilwork Mach 2 or whatever you want to call it so that’s something we want to promote a lot and we’ll do some old stuff as well. We’re trying to make the live set as intense as possible and very high energy and I hope noone will be disappointed because we’re going to do our best to please and entertain.
Andrew: I’m sure we will be all entertained! Obviously for a band that has been around for as long as you have been and with the number of albums that you have got, that must be a difficult process I guess to come up with a new setlist every tour.
David: Oh yeah it’s always difficult but we try to throw in some deep cuts past albums in there as well and then we do the classics, the things that people expect to hear. I mean for this last tour cycle a song like “Stålfågel” from the latest album has become like an anthem live, at least in Europe people are really enjoying it so it’s great that we’re still producing classics and anthems that are live staples because that’s a big thing for us to still be a relevant band and still create new stuff that equals what we’ve done in the past and I think we’ve managed to come up with new classics even though the band itself has been going for almost 20 years now.
Andrew: Yeah it is one of those things I guess where, especially for metal fans in particular, they always hold on to those early first albums so it must feel really good to still produce new material that fans hook onto.
David: Yeah up until just a few years ago we always tried to do stuff from the first 2 albums but the majority of our audience, especially live has changed because we did some songs from the first albums and the crowd didn’t really know how to react to it because it’s so different from what we do now. This adolescent, angsty death metal and I think we’ve evolved as a band and I think the crowd wants to hear what we’re about now and that’s a nice feeling because the reason why we’re still doing this is because we want to evolve as a band and we want to be creative and try to push the envelope as far as creating new stuff within the metal context but still adding strange outside elements and creating music that doesn’t exist. That’s like our motto, whenever we enter the studio or try to write new songs it should be something that doesn’t exist. We always want to stretch outside of the formula and surprise people, and ourselves.
Andrew: Yeah I guess that’s a goal that any relevant band wants to achieve. Is that becoming more difficult or do you find that there are always new ideas that you want to try and experiment with and work out with yourselves?
David: Yeah I mean me and Bjorn the singer, we write for the last one all the songs and I’m also a lyricist so we can spread our thing. For this last album we have this theme of mortality and how you approach middle age and sort of become aware of your mortality and people start dying around you like friends and family and that was the theme for the album, how you escape mortality as a middle aged metal musician [laughs]. Life has a tendency to bring change as you grow older and you get new influences so you become a better songwriter and musician, you’re not that anxious anymore. Is this metal, is this death metal, it’s just Soilwork, if you come up with a good riff and a good song, you just do it and just hope that people like it. But I think it’s hard when you’re 20 and you come across as a pure metal musician and for us that anxiety doesn’t exist anymore, I guess we just have to be able to play music together and as a band. In this incarnation of the band, I’ve now been playing with them on and off since 2006 and became a full time member in 2012 and I think this lineup, whenever we’re in the room together we discuss the music and what we can do with it in a very constructive way, like noone is holding us back anymore which has been the case in the past by other members who said you can’t do this or you can’t do that. But nowadays it’s like everyone is open for experimenting and trying to push it as far as we can go in those directions and mixing it up like having an old school Alice Cooper riff and having a blast beat underneath it!
Andrew: Yeah it comes across as a far more different listening experience I guess. Speaking of the members of the band and the chemistry, I realize you have a new member of the band Bastian Thusgaard on the drums who replaced Dirk Verbeuren last year so how has that all been going so far?
David: That’s been going fine, obviously Dirk is one of the best drummers in the world with the technical extreme metal drumming but Bastian is a bit younger than the rest of us, I think he’s 25 or 26 and he’s grown up listening to Soilwork and all kinds of extreme metal but at the same time he’s a totally all around drummer whereas Dirk had his metal thing but he never liked classic rock and all that which me and Bjorn obviously love and some of the others as well. We can jam between various genres in a more convincing way with Bastian because he can play Phil Rudd and he can play Derek Roddy as well [laughs], so I think the overall listening experience because we’ve benefited from having him there because he can switch effortlessly between genres and that’s what we want to do. We want to combine the extreme metal elements with stuff that are more classic and there’s a new found groove to the classic parts that we haven’t had in the past.
Andrew: Yeah I definitely get a lot of that classic rock sound and even classic metal there but as I said before, it’s all mixing it together and making it a far more interesting listening experience. I feel in some ways Soilwork is probably a better band now than it was say 15 years ago, maybe you guys agree with that in some way.
David: Yeah I mean I wasn’t part of the band 15 years ago but I guess we’ve had quite a few lineup changes which I guess is inevitable if you start a band and you go for 20 years, then things happen. People want to pursue different interests and the lifestyle of a touring rock musician, it’s not for everybody. I mean it sounds kind of fun for people to just travel around the world and play music but it’s also quite stressful but I think we’ve got a nice mix right now of various creative inputs and everyone is pretty much on the same page as far as where we want to take the band in the future. We’re all really excited to create new stuff, we have a new single coming out hopefully within the next month which is also quite different from anything we’ve done before but it’s very much about mixing those elements like the extreme metal elements with classic rock elements and what we want to do is create new music that doesn’t exist [laughs]. It sounds a bit strange but that’s our goal, every new song we do we want it to sound like something that noone has done before. Even if the building blocks of the song are familiar, we will combine them in ways that are new and interesting.
Andrew: This new song that you have coming out soon, is this for a future album or is it just a one-off?
David: It’s just a one-off and we’re hoping to release a few singles over the upcoming months just to keep up our presence and alert people that we’re still active. I think if you look at the music industry, I guess the old tour-albums cycle thing is going to die within the next decade I think because the money isn’t there. At the same time it’s sad because it’s always nice to release an album because an album is sort of a statement like, ‘This is our new album’ but the way people consume music these days it’s quite different from when I grew up I went to the local record store and bought an album and I sat and listened to it and looked through the booklet or the vinyl cover and everything and listened to it all the way through. Whereas these days people mostly have streaming playlists and if you release an album, perhaps one song will get on to a few playlists and people will like it and the rest of the album will sort of disappear and I think the way forward is to be more creative and do one-off things which could be a bit more hit and miss but at the same time it’s not like we’re an album like an album from Celtic Frost, “Cold Lake” [laughs].
Andrew: Oh yeah [laughs].
David: So we can try different stuff, we do 1 song and if it’s too strange for people, fine we will do another song and see what happens. Personally I would like to go more into a progressive, experimental thing where you still have great choruses and great songs but you can branch out even more and create videos for it and make it more of an experience. I think that’s what we’re trying to achieve, it’s not just releasing an album, we want to create a world you can step into and kind of escape the boredom of ordinary, everyday life.
Andrew: Well we are looking forward to hearing this new song then! You’re right, it is sad how the music industry is but I guess like you were saying, you gotta evolve with the times. We are looking forward to seeing you in Australia, it’s always exciting to see Soilwork in our territory so looking forward to it and we will see you at the end of October.
David: Yeah super!
SOILWORK 2019 Re-scheduled tour dates are:
Thursday 31st October – The Triffid, Brisbane
Friday 1st November – Manning Bar, Sydney
Saturday 2nd November – Max Watt’s, Melbourne
** Tickets to all Australian shows already purchased will be valid for new shows.
Tickets from: www.hardlinemedia.net
