DARK TRANQUILLITY Guitarist: 'We're Rehearsing Like Madmen'

Follow The Hollow of KickedInTheFace.com recently conducted an interview with DARK TRANQUILLITY guitarist Niklas Sundin. A few excerpts from the question-and-answer session follow:

KickedInTheFace.com: How are things going for the new DARK TRANQUILLITY album?

Niklas Sundin: "It's going fine, thanks! We're rehearsing like madmen and things are really starting to take shape now even if there still is a lot of work to be done. The recordings will take place in October/November, and we're aiming to have the album out in the spring of 2007."

KickedInTheFace.com: What kind of sound can DARK TRANQUILLITY fans expect to hear on it?

Niklas: "It's too early to tell; we usually don't know for sure ourselves before an album is actually recorded. Some of the material we're working on is very intense and harsh, whereas some is more soft and catchy — so we'll see how it all will be balanced in the end. At this point, it's still pretty open."

KickedInTheFace.com: Do you have a title figured out, or will that come later?

Niklas: "It's possible that Mikael has some ideas, but it's nothing that we've even talked about yet. It's hard to set a representative album title before all the songs are completed, and there's no big rush either."

KickedInTheFace.com: What is your least favorite aspect about touring and playing live?

Niklas: "Everything except from the playing I guess. I'm not a party animal or a very social person, and I hate attention and being surrounded by people all the time, so touring fucks me up completely after a while. Of course there have been many memorable and great moments on the road, but on the whole it's far from the exciting adventure that many people believe it to be."

KickedInTheFace.com: Your side project, LAETHORA, is a bit heavier than DARK TRANQUILLITY. Was this band a way for you to get back to your death metal roots?

Niklas: "It's probably more a way of getting to work with different kinds of expression. In DARK TRANQUILLITY, everyone has vastly different music tastes, and the riffs that I personally like the most usually never make it to the songs since I'm the only one thinking they're good, ha ha! LAETHORA has more room for the dissonant, atonal and 'weird' riffing that I'm very fond of, so it's a nice variation."

KickedInTheFace.com: What do you think of the success of other Swedish bands, and how people see the Gothenburg metal scene as legendary?

Niklas: "In a way it's flattering that the music from here has made an impact to so many people and younger bands, and no one can deny that we were all doing something that at the time was very original and innovative and created a new subgenre of metal. At the same time, it's old news and everything that possibly can be said about it has already been said a million times."

KickedInTheFace.com: How come musicians from Gothenburg always seem to play (or have played) in several other bands, sometimes even playing different instruments?

Niklas: "I think the situation is the same everywhere. In a small scene there's not exactly an abundance of musicians, and as everyone tends to know each other there's bound to be a lot of inbreeding going on."

Read the entire interview at KickedInTheFace.com.