MEGALOMANIUM, Eclipse’s 10th album hits the streets on September 1, 2023 and it’s well worth the wait. As the press release says it’s an album “riddled with the full DNA of the band, a fearless dive into the deep end of the pool – or in this case – the lake Siljan surrounding the island in the middle of Sweden where we record all our music.” It’s a real highlight of the year and for me a contender for best of the year. Eclipse continues to evolve and grow and let with every release stays just as essential.” We couldn’t agree more, it must be time to catch up with fellow Liverpool FC supporter Victor Crusner to get the lowdown…
Mark: How are you?
Victor: Hi it’s all good, all good, I’m sipping on some mango flavoured water as you do.
Mark: I’ve just got standard flavoured water here.
Victor: Yeah but you got a wine glass at least, looks like it you know.
Mark: Even better – a whiskey glass!
Victor: That’s better, I’ve got a Mo Salah cup, Liverpool FC.
Mark: Fantastic, are you a Liverpool fan?
Victor: Yeah I have been for many years, sports isn’t generally something we discuss a lot within the band its mainly me and my brother who tend to watch football and we always take over the back of the bus to play FIFA and the other guys just like they sit there and stare into the abyss of our competitiveness. Actually the story was the last time we flew to Australia this Spring Winter I had like one of those portable Nintendo switch machines right and I have one game on it and its FIFA. You might have done the trek of going like the distance between Europe and Australia, its wicked long man it takes some time right and there’s booze involved like some gin and tonics or whatever and were sitting there and getting in to it right and I just like 3 hours in into our 16 hour flight to Bali I just realised we can’t do this because he’s gonna get like thrown off the plane right because he gets so competitive you start throwing stuff you know its not great, that’s what we do.
Mark: That’s cool, great Team though, that’s my Team, Liverpool. We did well tonight with 10 men against Bournemouth, though it was only Bournemouth.
Victor: I thought so too, this is awesome we can only talk about Liverpool now! (laughs)
Mark: Next time you come over, that’s what we’ll talk about!
Victor: That sounds great, that’s awesome! (laughs)
Mark: Let’s get to the music before we get sidetracked! Its a great album, I’ve been playing it for a while now and can’t seem to put it down!
Victor: Thank you so much.
Mark: It’s so good I ordered the signed vinyl. The last time I saw you in person it was in a very blue room in Adelaide!
Victor: Yes that’s right! That was one of the hottest days I have ever experienced – you know what it was like, there’s some dry heat down there in Adelaide right! (laughs) but it was wonderful the whole trip was great – coming to Australia for us I think especially with the help of Silverback it was just such a proper tour package and it was very well arranged and it was great because we did Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney and the band had only ever been to Melbourne before I think.
Mark: Yeah indeed, I met the guys before you came on board at the previous time they were there at the Melodic Rock Fest as it was then in Melbourne, that first time when your brother was there as well which was cool, we got to hang and have a few beers.
Victor: He almost did that again but covid came in the way I think, he was supposed to play the Melodic Rock Fest in like March 2020 and we were so close to actually being like on the way to the airport to go to Melbourne but it would of just been a disaster because I don’t think we could of left Australia for like a year or something.
Mark: Yeah, they sort of all got out so it wrapped up about a week before they closed the borders. Chip from Enuff Z’Nuff and Janet Gardner and a few other people just managed to make it, I think Kip Winger was the last to escape – he played a show in Perth where we are over in the West and he had like 2 days before the borders shut to get home.
Victor: Oh man that stress is different though its a different stress compared to like catching a flight home its not knowing what the future holds like flying 15 hours to LA that’s crazy!
Mark: Yeah I know what you mean. You’ve got a fantastic tour coming up as well with another band that we saw not that long ago
Victor: Yeah the newcomers H.E.A.T., yeah exactly! It will be great.
Mark: Yeah its a pretty damn good package actually. I wish we were there for it!
Victor: Oh yeah, its so fun to actually be able to do it cause I know even since before I joined the band its been a topic of discussion right? Going on tour with H.E.A.T and cause were kind of glued together no matter what we do so it might as well be on the road too right? They’re from the Stockholm area as well and they’ve been around as long as Eclipse has been around so for us to do this together and kind of have the all the tools we need to get that package going has been great. I mean I’m sure its been a lot of work for our booking agents and everyone who been involved but for us its just been like “Swell lets go!”, I can’t wait, it will be sweet.
Mark: I see some of the venues have been upgraded as well which is always a good sign.
Victor: Yeah that’s great, its also this one is very central Europe heavy this tour so its a lot of Germany and some Switzerland, Austria Belgium and so forth. Hopefully we get to do it again and maybe hopefully go different places as well. It’s kind of a first attempt of doing something together and I think we’re all excited – you know different crews and parties.
Mark: Well it will be fantastic I’m sure. Let’s talk about the new album – Megalomanium has sort of reverted back to that way of naming albums Eclipse had fora while – we had Wired previously but obviously 10 Albums in we’ve gone back to the sort of sound of like Armageddonize and all that kind of stuff as well, I was going to ask Erik about that but you’ll probably know anyway, why have we reverted back. I thought it was like the Swedish version of Z.Z. Top because Z.Z. Top always used to cleverly name their albums in a certain way?
Victor: Thats true that was the point here that we wanted to make, we wanted to have a title that would be you know tied together with this era of the band like Wired. Like you said Wired was the odd one out – I think we just picked Wired cause it just felt like a suitable term for that record and it was us coming out of the gates after covid right? But Megalomanium is like not a word we’re not even English speakers in terms of you know its not our first language but we just assumed its not a word and we wanted to have a title that was going to be tied to this record and you know something that’s more like strong in that sense and I think it also suited what we were trying to do. Wee were talking about looking back to ‘Armageddonize’ and a lot of things that would have fit really well on the ‘Monumentum’ record and ‘Paradigm’ as well and ‘Wired’ stuff and ‘Are You Ready To Rock’ stuff. I would say like maybe parts of ‘Children of The Night’ like the riffing would of been like an ‘Are You Ready to Rock ‘thing and maybe that there’s some stuff in there like ‘So Long Farewell’ could have been a riff on ‘Bleed and Scream’ you know?
Mark: That’s how I felt it sounded.
Victor: But we weren’t really thinking about that while we were making it, at least I wasn’t and we weren’t discussing it openly but I think what we wanted to do is that we wanted it to be like a broader brush with the ‘Eclipse roller’! Kind of like we just wanted it to have all these different ingredients that we love to do live cause we realise now you know 10 albums into your career when we play a live show whether its a festival show which is usually 60 minutes or 75 or whatever or if we do a club show or a headline show which is an hour and a half you know we have all these things that we look at as our evergreens right? These are our songs that we are always gonna play – you know the ones – like ‘Downfall of Eden’ every night and we all love it you know cause its a hit for us and hopefully for the crowd too. So I think we just like went in to the studio thinking let’s keep that in mind, you know, let’s keep the live bit in mind and try to find ways for us to write songs meant for the stage in all the different ways!
Mark: There are certainly different type’s of Eclipse songs in the repertoire that we all love.
Victor: That’s right. You know we have the massive anthemic stuff which is, funnily enough, on this record called ‘Anthem’ (laughs) and that’s one of those big numbers – kind of think about a German Festival and that’s the stuff you know we love to do. Then you have the kind of ‘punky edgy’ stuff going in which I mean some people have said that it sounds like pop punk, some people have said it sounds like there’s Ramones or Pistols in there, or whatever and I get that. Then you have poppier stuff like ‘The Hardest Part Is losing You’. We all just went in to write as good songs as we possibly could at the time right and when you do that you don’t really think about what it sounds like or what genre its a part of. The DNA of Eclipse will always be in the backbone of the band and especially with songwriters like Erik and Magnus and even Philip there’s always going to be some baggage there that comes along with writing a song with these guys which is truly awesome and it all plays to our strengths. I think whenever we do, we do it together and I think that’s how we ended up with this like broader album. It’s a more diverse album because we didn’t have any naysayers – we were all just going “OK this sounds great, that’s a cool tempo lets go with that.” you know. All in all an Eclipse record is a collection of songs that are meant to be as great a collections of songs as possible, right and I think that’s where we ended up with this one we just felt like its different than lets say ‘Wired’ cause ‘Wired’ was one where we actually went into ‘Wired’ thinking “OK let’s make it fast paced, let’s make it more Rock ‘n’ Roll, more live sounding,” And this one is just like “OK let’s do everything that we love” and that’s how we ended up with Megalomanium.
Mark: It’s interesting you say that because its spookily like the way that Nuno Bettencourt described the Extreme album: it’s like you’ve got certain songs that do certain things and he was explaining that they sort of curated the last album Six like it was a live set so there was a song that had a certain task on the record and I think in a way that the new Eclipse album ‘Megalomanium’ sort of does that in a way, you can imagine it being played live and there are moments there where its just hell for leather there are moments where you want the crowd singing along. Then the heavier moments like you said. I think you mentioned most of my favourite songs on there as well! I mean I loved everything from the very poppy first single that came out to the ‘Children of The Night’ with the sort of like big meaty riff and then you’ve got Anthem which sort of like to me its got that Celtic vibe.
Victor: Yeah which is funny in itself cause that’s what I love, you know. I think we’re all big fans of Celtic music and Irish and Scottish tunes and any Gaelic form of expression is great but it has a lot of similarities to what we would say or call Swedish folk music .
Mark: Yeah that’s what Erik told me last time. We hear it as Celtic because that’s how we hear it where we’re from but it’s really a universal thing. I think everyone in the world probably has heard that sound but depending on where you are from you see it as what is familiar to you, but really its actually quite universal.
Victor: Yeah I think its a beautiful thing because every culture probably has that where you mix the melancholy right? And you mix minor and major right? Essentially it just adds a lot to a song, it adds a sweet touch to a lot of riffs right? Like when you look back at ‘The Downfall of Eden’ that was one of those songs like ‘Monumentum’ that was obviously not the first time the band did that, but it was the first song that kind of had that as its full ID. The idea behind the song was to kind of make it more folky, you know, and I think that has always been even before that – I mean ‘Under The Gun’ has a traditional Swedish folk song as the guitar solo right? And so Erik and Magnus have always with their guitar playing found ways to incorporate classic music into Eclipse. Like traditional Swedish music. They grew up with their Fathers who were both very big fans of 60’s guitar music so that’s how they kind of grew up with listening to guitar in their home and I guess we’re talking about bands like the Shadows – so they have always found ways to like tweak their playing and their melody writing. And that has always been interesting to me because I’m not a guitar player in any sense but I think we’re pretty similar in how we play things but its also like what they think about when they hear a certain chord progression and how they can incorporate what we did with the last album with ‘Twilight’ when we just threw in some Bach! We kind of just used that as a end chorus part of the song because they were just like “It fits!” and I was like “Yeah it fits!” and its really cool, and there’s a ton of that stuff as well I think! There’s a lot of Celtic or Swedish folk stuff and Western stuff as well that you can hear on say ‘High Road’ which is one of those tracks that has a lot of that. The last track ‘Forgiven’ too has a lot of that – its also kind of funny because I think we allowed ourselves to be a bit angsty when it comes to like lyrics and the theme of the album. It’s kind of like, not us pretending to be Manowar, its maybe a little bit like the opposite you know? I think that’s present in every track, I think it is because lyrically I think the themes on the album are very much about things vulnerability and what makes us human, and I love that.
Mark: Exactly! Not like Manowar but so like Manowar as the conviction goes! I mean its a wonderful album in that there’s that sense of freedom that I like. Everyone knows Eclipse, you’ve been around a while now, you’ve got 10 albums out so there’s a feeling of “Hey we don’t have to be anything we can just make great songs that sound like Eclipse”, and that’s the freedom that sees a band come into their own. I was just looking at the stats for the review and we’ve just clicked over almost 7000 reads on the review so there’s a lot of people out there that are on board and I’ll bet can’t wait till September 1st!
Victor: Man that’s awesome!
Mark: There’s some great stuff on there, great stuff for everyone too. I think my favourites on there were, well there’s two that sort of stood out for me – you mentioned one of them before ‘So Long Farewell Goodbye’ which has got a bit of everything in there I even got a bit of Dio in there?
Victor: Yeah for sure, absolutely, its got Dio. It’s got the obvious part that has that kind of late eighties kind of Dr. Feelgood meets Skid Row thing going on. My favourite thing about that track is I really love the drums on that track I think they really hit! Like the fills and everything and its so cool you know, the way he is playing it! I get that’s not going to sell records on its own but I really love that track. I think that’s a great one, I think the vocal delivery is really good too its got us treading a lot of new waters as well. Like we’re trying to find a new way to do choruses that are not like you might expect. You know we wanted it to be big like we talked about before – it is one of my favourites as well.
Mark: ‘Hearts Collide’ was another favourite – that has great melodies!
Victor: I think that was one of the earlier tracks we wrote and I think it was me and Erik in the studio, I think that we kinda of did it in a day as far as a demo goes, it was all there. I think everything that we did there we replicated later on when we took it to the band and did the live thing and made it real. So I’m very happy about that song, but it’s also kinda weird when that happens – when you make a song ad it’s kinda done in a couple of hours. That can be when you start second-guessing yourself (laughs) – you know “Is it ready?” (laughs) But we’re bandmates and we’re the biggest Eclipse fans around, and we’re also the biggest Eclipse critics so I do thin that we’re usually pretty honest and pretty upfront about how we fee about certain songs. This one everyone was like “It’s good. Don’t change anything. It’s good.”
Mark: I think sometimes when a song comes to fast the inclination is to tinker with it but that can strip away the magic if you try and do too much.
Victor: Exactly!
Mark: If we can go back to Football for a second, I must admit I was pretty disappointed when your women’s team lost to Spain, I had England v Sweden down for the final all along!
Victor: I don’t bet on sports when a team I’m rooting for is involved but I was really hoping that they would do it. There are good things that come out of it though – they’ve had a great tournament and that Sweden v USA game was incredible with the penalties that came afterwards and the same against Japan. But that’s the way it goes, that’s the way the cookie crumbles and sometimes you win, sometimes they lose.
Mark: That’s very philosophical, it was a great tournament though, glad you enjoyed it.
Victor: I did.
Mark: Let’s talk a little about you now, how are you settling in as the ‘new’ boy?
Victor: It feels weird because, what is it now 2023? Next year will be five years.
Mark: It’s gone so fast, and we did lose a bit.
Victor: We did, but we didn’t stop working for that. It’s been great I think from the point when my brother joined which I think was 2015, when they were there in Australia it was great and as we’re pretty close as people go I got to know the guys pretty well then and there. So they’re always been a part of my world since that day so it wasn’t really that strange when I hopped on for the tour in support of ‘Paradigm’ in 2019. It was the nicest tour I have ever been on, in that everyone was having a good time. And Germany and Switzerland and Austria in October / November the weather can be a bit cranky – it rains a lot and by Day 15 you’re kind of missing home a bit, but we all just had fun with it. And it was such a nice tour for everybody I think. And in a way that’s just really carried on to where we are at right now. We leave on tour next week to go to Germany again and so for me that means you get to focus and be excited about teh good things about being on tour: meeting fans and cool people and getting to play loud rock music every night. And I love that we’re all so supportive of each other like one big family and that includes the crew too who I’ve known for as many years as the other guys. So it might be a cliche but we really are like a family, we’re all very supportive of each other and make each other as comfortable as possible.
Mark: Sounds great! It’s been great to talk today, I love the album but before you go as a first time interviewee there’s just two questions we have to ask you.
Victor: OK!
Mark: If you could have been a ‘fly on the wall’ for the creation of any great Rock album from any time in Rock and Roll history – just to see how the magic happened – what would you like to have seen being made?
Victor: Wow! Thats hard, off the top of my head I’d have to say ‘Sergeant Peppers’ – that’s probably a common answer but I think that would have been crazy!
Mark: (laughs) You’re in good company there!
Victor: I just think that would have been crazy.
Mark: Oh it would – just to see that creative process going!
Victor: Absolutely.
Mark: And finally we’ll close with the easy one – ‘What is the meaning of life?’
Victor: Is it 42? You know – Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy, ether that or find a way to laugh! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs) It could well be as simple as that! Thank you so much Vic it’s been great to chat and hopefully we shall see you down this way again soon.
Victor: We’d love that. Talk to you soon! And remember – ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’
Mark: The perfect way to end and maybe another contender for ‘The meaning of life!’
