ERIK MARTENSSON Talks Juggling ECLIPSE, NORDIC UNION, W.E.T. And AMMUNITION

In a new interview with Music Radar, Swedish guitarist/vocalist/producer Erik Martensson (ECLIPSE, NORDIC UNION, W.E.T., AMMUNITION) discussed how he's managed to stay so prolific in recent years.

"When I start writing and start working on music, I'm pretty fast at it," he said. "That kind of saves me, because I don't spend day after day trying to write a song. If I have inspiration, I write pretty fast, and sometimes, I can get a pre-production demo in two hours, from the initial idea to something you can listen to and send over to someone. Sometimes, of course, it will take days — you're not satisfied with a part, but you still like the song, so you rework it — but most times, it goes really fast."

Martensson's latest release is "Second Coming", the sophomore album by NORDIC UNION, his project with fellow Scandinavian Ronnie Atkins (PRETTY MAIDS). He confirmed that when writing material for the new record, the pair drew inspiration from "the more moody kind of songs" from the group's 2016 self-titled debut. "From the first album, some of those songs, they had a kind of sound that doesn't sound like every other band. That's what we tried to focus on," he said.

He noted that one new NORDIC UNION song, however, was written while he was working on the latest W.ET. album, "Earthrage". "I try to always write all the songs consistently in a specific period, just to keep the whole vibe of the album intact," he said. "Sometimes, of course, it happens that I come up with riffs or even songs like 'Walk Me Through The Fire'. That was actually written while I was writing the previous W.E.T. album. [I thought,] 'This really sounds like NORDIC UNION, not W.E.T.,' so I saved it. It happens, but not usually. Usually, I just go for it, and I always, always try to make the best possible album. It's not that I'm keeping the best songs for ECLIPSE or something else. I always try to make the best record ever."

Martensson's next release will be the new album by ECLIPSE, which is on track to be released in May. "We're going to keep trying to find out what is ECLIPSE — what is our sound? — and wash away even more of the influences we've had since we were kids, and try to come up with something unique and original," he said.

Read more at MusicRadar.com.

In addition to fronting ECLIPSE — whose latest album, "Monumentum", was released via Frontiers Music Srl in 2017 — Martensson wrote, produced and performed on three of 2018's top melodic rock/AOR releases: "Earthrage", the third album by W.E.T.; "Second Coming", the sophomore effort by NORDIC UNION; and the self-titled second album by AMMUNITION.