DRAGONFORCE Wrote 12-Minute 'Epic Song' In Response To Fan Requests

Kash of the "Moshpit" show, which airs on the SYN 90.7 radio station in Melbourne, Australia, recently conducted an interview with DRAGONFORCE guitarist Herman Li. You can now listen to the chat below.

Asked how DRAGONFORCE's forthcoming album, "Reaching Into Infinity", is musically different to the band's previous efforts, Herman said: "I would say it's a continuation of the last album, 'Maximum Overload'. DRAGONFORCE always try to evolve and continue evolving our sound. So I think it's a natural progression as the band kind of continues to go through every album. This is just, I would say, another step and another chapter to what we've been doing. We do have a few things that people haven't heard, of course, on it, so that's where the evolution comes from."

He continued: "A lot of fans have been asking, 'Hey, why don't you guys make this massive, long epic — you know, a fifteen-minute, twenty-minute, half-an-hour song?' So we haven't done a half-an-hour song, but we have done a really long, epic song that we have been thinking about, and we finally achieved it. So I think fans will be really happy to hear something like that — just to bring another big, epic DRAGONFORCE sound."

Regarding how technological advances have affected the DRAGONFORCE songwriting and recording process since the band's early years more than a decade ago, Li said: "[It's] not so much different, to be honest, because music… We record it using a computer into a hard drive, and the software we use to record the music is still very old. Because the new software doesn't make that much of a difference to music like us, because we're not playing electronic music. We mainly just record it, like a tape recording on it. So there's not so much difference for us."

"Reaching Into Infinity" will be released on May 19 via earMUSIC. The follow-up to 2014's "Maximum Overload" will mark the band's third full-length studio release with singer Marc Hudson, who joined the group in 2011 following the departure of original frontman ZP Theart (now in SKID ROW).