DISMEMBER Rules Out Full-Length Tours: 'We Don't Do More Than Two Shows In One Weekend'

In a new interview with Mark Kadzielawa of 69 Faces Of Rock, drummer Fred Estby and guitarist David Blomqvist of long-running Swedish death metallers DISMEMBER spoke about the band's current reunion, which began nearly six years ago. Regarding how he and his bandmates decided to return to playing live shows,  Fred said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I moved to the United States in 2016. I toured — I'm a sound engineer, so I did a lot of front-of-house jobs for other bands, touring with other bands. And people sometimes came up to me and would be, like, 'Are you Fred from DISMEMEBER?' I'm, like, 'Yeah, why?' 'You guys should tour again. You guys should play again.' And I'm, like, 'Yeah, whatever.' People say that and they don't really mean it. But after a couple of years, like around 2017, I was, like, 'Oh, maybe there is a real interest that is big enough for us to maybe think about playing together.' And we were not all on the same page then, but we let it go. So we kind of forgot about it. But then around 2018, we started getting real offers to do festivals and so on. And people were actually saying that, like, 'Whatever you want, whatever you need within reason, we want you to play.' So, we finally got on the same page, all of us, and we were, like, 'Yeah, let's do it again. Let's see how this goes.'"

Asked what he and other members of DISMEMBER are doing differently now that they didn't do before, Fred said: "We do not do any long tours. We don't do more than two shows in one weekend. If we start touring again, you're gonna start seeing the bad sides of being away from your family and your home and your work, and you can't take off from work. We all have careers that we don't wanna give up. So, that's number one. Number two is that we promised each other that any show or any decision that we do for the band is gonna be — everybody has to be in, all five of us. If that's not happening, then it's not gonna happen. And number two was that we said that if it's not fun, we shouldn't do it. We need to know that we're having as much fun as we did when we started out, so that we're laughing, there's more positivity than negativity around the shows we're doing. That was really important to us. And that's why we keep it like this. People are, like, 'Oh, you should come tour.' Or, 'If you could be on the road instead, we could pay a little less for you guys to come play. And then you can play more shows and all that.' Yeah, but that is the problem. Then you start compromising on your own terms. So we're never gonna do that. We're never gonna tour. If we play more than two shows in one week, that's gonna be very rare, and it has to be very special. Otherwise, we keep it like this. And that makes it fun for us, for the audience, and we also know that there's gonna be good quality for all the shows that we're playing."

As for the possibility of a new DISMEMBER album, Fred said: "Yeah, I mean, we have material already. We're talking about making an album. It's just a matter of when and where and how, because we don't live… I live in the U.S, Richard [Cabeza, bass] lives in Belgium, the other three guys live in Sweden still, so we just have to plan it out well. And also we're still getting offers to play around 10 shows per year, which is what we can do. We can't really do much more than that per year. So as long as those offers keep coming in, then it's kind of hard to say no to that just to record an album, because we also wanna play live. So I guess we're gonna have to try to plan something out, but we're talking about how to do it. So we'll see."

David added: "Everyone wants to make a new album, of course. It's not like we're doing a greatest-hits show and get the cash. I'm enjoying this more than I did before. I'm having so much fun. As Fred said, now it's on our terms. So it's just a lot of positive energy."

In a May 2024 interview with Hells Headbangers' Justin Horval, DISMEMBER vocalist Matti Karki spoke about a possible follow-up to the band's 2008's album "Dismember". He said: "I know we have to do something. First of all, we need to, or we want to, keep our style, but still it has to be different in a way, because there's a lot of bands who does the old stuff. So we have to find our new niche, what we're doing. But at this moment, I think we have a couple of riffs. The guys have been writing at home. We haven't heard it. We haven't done anything. The only thing we've been talking about, yeah, we need to do a new album. And we have to find a way to make songs across three different countries — Fred in the States, three of us in Sweden, and one in Belgium… We'll see what happens since we only talked about it."

Earlier in May, Cabeza was asked by RichardMetalFan if there is any possibility of fans getting some new music from DISMEMBER soon. He responded: "For sure, man. It's happening. When, I can't tell you right now. But we have talked about writing new music. We are writing new music individually, but we haven't started to write music together as a band. We have been so busy with playing shows the past couple of years and doing all this other stuff. But I think we're getting closer and closer. Let's see what happens next year in 2025. Maybe we'll actually start putting some songs together. But a hundred percent, a new DISMEMBER album will happen. No doubt, no doubt. But we have very high expectations on ourselves as a band to release a new album."

In August 2023, Estby was asked by Arto Lehtinen of Metal Rules if it is harder to write new songs because DISMEMBER has a huge legacy. Fred responded: "It's not hard at all. So the thing is, we have a license deal with Nuclear Blast. We have an option to do one or two more albums. Great. We can do whenever we want, which is even more perfect for us. So we can take our time and we're going to take our time because we're not going to release something that is half-assed. We're going to be very critical about [it], especially since it's been such a long time since the last album. And I love the DISMEMBER album that I'm not even on that was released in 2008. It's a great album. If you're going to release an album now as a reunited band in two thousand and fucking twenty-three, twenty-four, you're going to have to try to match like ever before. You cannot be shy of that. We're going to be very critical about it and that's going to take some time because we don't live in the same cities like we hang out every day."

In July 2022, it was announced that DISMEMBER had once again partnered with Nuclear Blast Records, the label that released the band's 1990 demo, "Reborn In Blasphemy", their 1991 debut album, "Like An Everflowing Stream", as well as the four records that would follow. In celebration of this announcement, a fully remastered version of "Like An Everflowing Stream" was made available on streaming services worldwide after it had been absent for quite some time.

"Like An Everflowing Stream" — hailed by many as one of the best death metal albums of all time — was the first entry in a reissue campaign of the entire DISMEMBER back catalog, which was recently remastered from the original albums.

Between 1988 and 2011, DISMEMBER earned a notorious reputation as the "MOTÖRHEAD of death metal", through eight classic albums and furious live shows around the globe. The band was formed by Robert Sennebäck, David Blomqvist and Fred Estby in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1988 and has long since been regarded as one of the originators of the trademark Swedish death metal sound, next to other pioneering bands such as ENTOMBED, GRAVE and UNLEASHED. DISMEMBER recorded a couple of independently released demos before their 1990 demo cassette, "Reborn In Blasphemy", with Matti Kärki on vocals and ENTOMBED's Nicke Andersson taking over most lead guitar parts, got picked up for a wider release by Nuclear Blast Records. In 1991, "Like An Everflowing Stream" saw the light of day, which was recorded by Tomas Skogsberg at the now-legendary Sunlight Studios, and featured Richard Cabeza (UNANIMATED) on bass. DISMEMBER released its acclaimed sophomore album, "Indecent & Obscene", in 1993, which to this day remains their most successful output. Three more albums would follow on Nuclear Blast, "Massive Kiling Capacity" (1995),"Death Metal" (1997) and "Hate Campaign" (2000),until the band decided to switch labels. They released two more albums, "Where Ironcrosses Grow" (2004, Karmageddon Records) and "The God That Never Was" (2005, Regain) before Estby announced his departure for family reasons in 2007. Their last album, "Dismember", followed in 2008 and the band officially broke up in 2011. After an eight-year hiatus, the band's original lineup reunited for a 30th-anniversary gig at Scandinavia Death Fest in October 2019, performing together for the first time in over 20 years.

DISMEMBER is:

Fred Estby (Drums)
David Blomqvist (Guitars)
Robert Sennebäck (Guitars)
Matti Karki (Vocals)
Richard Cabeza (Bass)