DARK TRANQUILLITY Frontman Discusses Making Of New Album

Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal of Metal Assault conducted an interview with vocalist Mikael Stanne of Swedish melodic death metallers DARK TRANQUILLITY on March 6, 2010 at The Wiltern in Los Angeles California. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Assault: The new album "We Are The Void" is fantastic. You must be happy with how it turned out.

Mikael: Beyond happy! We worked so hard on this album. It's incredible but it's the hardest work I think we've ever done in the band. It was frustrating, torturous and tumultuous and everything else, but we pulled through and we did it. I don't think I've ever felt that same kind of satisfaction as I did that day, when I recorded my last line of vocals. It was like, "Alright this is it!" I could just sit down, open a beer and listen to the entire album through and through. The whole band just sat there and we were like, "Hey, hell yeah! This worked out." So we are incredibly proud of it.

Metal Assault: You guys have experimented quite well on the new record with tracks like "Iridium". Were you confident with that or did you think you were taking a risk?

Mikael: It was a risk but at the same time it was one we were willing to take. We talked about it early on that we wanted this album to be very diverse, that it shouldn't be compromised too much and we shouldn't be picky about the things we start out with. For instance, what we usually do is someone comes up with a riff or a piece of music and if we don't like it we just go with something else. But this time we figured, "Hey listen, work on it a little bit more. If it's not good in the beginning let's add to it, change it a little bit." Martin [Henriksson, guitar] and Daniel [Antonsson, bass] do something on it and all of a sudden we come up with something amazing that everybody agrees on. So that kind of creativity was really important this time around. Also, we said if there are melodies that are different and kind of out there, different from what is something normal for the fan, fine! Let's do it. We just wouldn't restrict ourselves anymore. We're just trying to mark the beginning of the next 20 years of the band's existence with something that is fresh and different.

Metal Assault: The Gothenburg metal scene influenced bands here in the U.S. in a weird way, as metalcore bands. Why do you think that was the case?

Mikael: I can't say why that is, but I think its kind of cool because that means the bands that wanted to create this kind of music wanted to do something differently. The metalcore bands wanted to do it more melodically and took influence from the stuff that we've done. They mixed that together and I think it is awesome. It's kind of the same idea that we had when we started out. We loved death metal and thrash but wanted it to be more melodic. So we took influence from speed metal and traditional heavy metal to combine the two, to create something that we thought was original and cool. So, the metalcore thing doesn't really appeal to me that much. But hey, doesn't matter. It's fine with me.

Metal Assault: What inspired the band to return to some of your clean vocals on the last album "Fiction" and now with this one, after a long time?

Mikael: It was just the songs. We wanted this album to be more diverse with more mellow stuff as well as some intense stuff. It just totally felt right in some parts. "Iridium", for instance, is a song that Niklas [Sundin, guitar] wrote in '95 or '96! It's always been there, we've always thought about it like perhaps we should use it, but never really worked. But for this album we felt like, "Fuck it. Let's do it!" because it fits in with the whole mood of the album. It was the first thing Martin B [piano, electronics] worked on when he first joined the band ten years back. Now it totally makes sense to have it on this album. Vocally, whatever fits in we go with it. For "Her Silent Language", Niklas had this verse and a chorus. It just made total sense for me to mix that up a little bit. I don't want to do it [clean vocals] for the sake of commercially doing something or do make it sound pop-like. It's just that it works and adds some spice to it! About "Iridium", it has never happened like this before where we had a song written since that long [14 years] ago. Niklas wrote it when he bought a portable studio and it was his first experiment of recording something all by himself with a drum machine and all of that. He was so proud of it. We all liked it, but we didn't really feel that it suited the album we were working on at that time. Finally it worked out and I'm really happy with that.

Read the entire interview from Metal Assault.