BEHEMOTH Frontman: 'Life Is Too Short To Try To Be Liked By Everybody'

Steve Harrison of "The Unchained Rock Show" recently conducted an interview with frontman Adam "Nergal" Darski of Polish black/death overlords BEHEMOTH. You can listen to the entire chat via the SoundCloud widget below. A few excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On whether the title of BEHEMOTH's new album, "I Loved You At Your Darkest", is open to interpretation:

Nergal: "When I came across this quote — it comes from the Bible — it just grabbed me. It grabbed me by the heart and I immediately felt a connection with it. Between the emotional background the album carries along — instead of trying to find something simple… 'The Satanist' was just straight-up; this one gives you more room for interpretation. It's a more multi-layered and complex title and so is the record, it seems."

On the songwriting approach for "I Loved You At Your Darkest":

Nergal: "We just go with the flow and go with what we feel like doing with BEHEMOTH. Then we just do it, we go for what it is sincere and what's honest and what's within our system and then we just spit it out. Then we learn about it. It's not all, I mean, it's a very intuition-driven record. We're not one of those bands who pre-plans everything, like every chord. We're not robots. It's a very human album."

On the stylistic changes the band incorporated on the new album:

Nergal: "The album is very diverse. We really dug deep into our past and used elements that I can easily call 'ancient' and we then throw them into the future. We not only look back, we look forward and look up and look forward and inside, every possible angle. It makes this album very super-varied. There's a lot of variety there. It's more adventurous as well. It's still very extreme while being adventurous."

On the release of pre-album singles "God = Dog", "Bartzabel" and "Wolves Ov Siberia":

Nergal: "I really like how much confusion it has caused for a lot of people. There's no single song that is representative for the whole record. Pretty much every single song stands on its own and every song stands out. Even when checking all the comments on the Internet, people see that. There's not an obvious best song or an obvious single because everyone picks up a different song. This proves that on 'The Satanist', everyone just loved 'Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer' or 'O Father O Satan O Sun!', but on this one, there's a group of followers for every song. It's cool, it's different."

On making strong political and social statements in his native Poland:

Nergal: "I very much like when it's polarized. It just represents the situation — that's what the world is like today, it's very polarized. It's very bipolar, it's very love-and-hate-based and I guess with my music, because it's very extreme, that's what it's meant to be. I'm not really good at politics; I'm not an expert. I'm just pissed off, as far as I'm concerned. It's just not the best time for the world. It's never the best, but it can be pretty good, but it's not. It can be pretty critical sometimes; it can be fatal sometimes. I don't know — I don't like that. I'm just speaking out my thoughts and observations. I'm just being honest with myself and I'm not doing that in order to attract more people. I get more people are going to dislike me, but life is too short to try to be liked by everybody. People are fucked. I don't give a fuck. I just do my own thing."

"I Loved You At Your Darkest" was released on October 5 via Metal Blade Records in North America and Nuclear Blast in Europe.