ARCH ENEMY To Enter Studio In December

Norman McCann of Tomb Of The Opinionated recently conducted an interview with vocalist Angela Gossow of Swedish/German extreme metallers ARCH ENEMY. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Tomb Of The Opinionated: How did you guys find playing the Maldives? That must have been quite an experience!

Angela: It was very controversial in terms of politics and religion there. The new, young president of the Maldives invited us. Heavy metal was banned there many years by the fundamentalist old government. The president wanted to set a sign and invited a band that plays real hard, sings about rebellion and freedom and got a female singer on top of that. We had a whole bunch of protest groups around the show and had the president's police escort at the show. But we weren't afraid. The show was very exciting and we had a lot of people there! It felt very passionate and real.

Tomb Of The Opinionated: You guys are one of the first metal bands to play there. How did the show come about?

Angela: We were invited by the president in collaboration with MOHD, a company from the Maldives. Many shows fell through in the past — but we were very dedicated, didn't care about the money and just went there. It was worth the headaches and hard work. Getting a show together in a place that has no infrastructure and equipment for this type of music isn't the easiest thing to pull off. No booking agent or external manager would have touched this. But we are self-managed and I got it all happening in the end. We had a wonderful time there.

Tomb Of The Opinionated: "Rise of the Tyrants" was extremely well received. It's definitely one of the heaviest albums you guys have released! Did that just occur naturally?

Angela: Yeah. And the new album will get even heavier. We are far from being old and tired. We wanna shred, blast, scream and go nuts.

Tomb Of The Opinionated: Any updates on a new album? Have you guys started writing?

Angela: Yes. We have nine songs by now and still got a ton of riffs, ideas and melodies lying around. We will lock ourselves away from the 1st December on and the album is scheduled to be released in May 2011. Lots of hard work, but we are more than ready for it and just wanna kill!

Tomb Of The Opinionated: Being a female singer in a metal band must attract a huge amount of attention from fans. Has it become easier to deal with over the years or has the attention just kept on increasing?

Angela: I don't feel the attention is focused on me – but on the whole entity that is ARCH ENEMY. And that is very good as we wanna be out there, play shows, get around, sell CDs, get more fans. We LOVE attention because it gets us further and further.

Tomb Of The Opinionated: You specialized in online marketing. Are you heavily involved in maintaining ARCH ENEMY's online presence? What about other aspects of the band's management?

Angela: I manage ARCH ENEMY and run all financial and business aspects of the band. I oversee and decide all tours and book them in those territories we don't have a booking agent for. Me and Michael [Amott, guitar] run all online sites, promo, etc. We design all merch together as well and I do the pre-production for all shows as well. I am a workaholic and just as tough in business as I look on stage.

Read the entire interview from Tomb Of The Opinionated.