HAMMERFALL's OSCAR DRONJAK Is 'Not Interested' In Seeing KISS Avatar Show: 'I've Seen' KISS Live 'A Million Times'

In a new interview with Jorge Botas of Portugal's Metal Global, guitarist Oscar Dronjak of Swedish metallers HAMMERFALL weighed in on a debate about people using an A.I. (artificial intelligence) music generator as a tool to create melodies, harmonies and rhymes based on artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithms and machine learning (M.L.) models. Oscar said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "What worries me is two things, actually. The first one is with A.I. more general, what can you believe after a while? Right now it's kind of easy to see the line, but it's getting blurrier and blurrier every day. And that is already a problem that is extremely big in today's society with news and shit. People just repost stuff without thinking, or they don't check what the source is. Just because it aligns in their little sphere of beliefs or whatever, they just push it out there and nobody bothers to check if it's true or not. And A.I. makes that a million times harder to spot, if it's true or not."

He continued: "As far as an artist, it does worry me in the sense that — 'cause if people say, 'I'm going to use it as a tool,' I think you lost the right to create songs, because then you're not coming up with anything. Even if somebody comes up with the idea, like in A.I., you put whatever in and they get, 'Oh, this was kind of a cool thing. I'm gonna steal that and say I wrote it.' I think that's gonna be very detrimental. And it also means that things are gonna sound more similar. They already are similar, but it's gonna be more and more similar because it's not infinite. So I'm actually very worried about that. I think as far as live shows go, okay, you can do a lot of shit now as well, but HAMMERFALL has always prided ourselves on being a rock and roll band, meaning that we play our instruments, we perform live and it's the energy that is the important part of the music and of the concerts. We always said, if you wanna have a flawlessly played concert or song, listen to the CD. Because the interaction between the audience and the band or the artists on stage, that is, for me, the whole concept on a heavy metal show. The live experience is the one thing you can't download."

When Botas noted that he is not interested in seeing ABBA's "Voyage" show in London, which was created using the same technology that is being used to produce the KISS avatars, Oscar said: "I see what you mean, and I agree with you with a band that I am not a super fan of, but a band that [I feel like] 'I don't care if it's a real thing or not, I can go see it,' then it would make sense. But for KISS, absolutely no way. I've seen 'em a million times. That's one of my favorite bands of all time, [it's] been [one of my favorite bands] since I was a kid. I'm not interested in seeing a A.I. KISS or whatever the thing they're planning — that doesn't have any allure for me at all."

The KISS avatars were created by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and were financed and produced by the Swedish company Pophouse Entertainment, which is behind "ABBA Voyage".

KISS will reportedly become the first American band to go fully virtual and stage its own avatar show.

The avatars will be available for live shows around the world and in digital online settings, which some people collectively refer to as the metaverse.

HAMMERFALL's latest album, "Avenge The Fallen", was released in August via Nuclear Blast Records.

In December 2022, HAMMERFALL, which started its career in 1997 on Nuclear Blast with its debut album "Glory To The Brave", announced that it was returning to the long-running German label.

HAMMERFALL's entire Nuclear Blast catalog, from "Glory To The Brave" to the 2014 album "(r)Evolution" was certified with a diamond award for over 1.5 million worldwide sales.

Following on from "Renegade" (2000),"Crimson Thunder" (2002) and "No Sacrifice, No Victory" (2009),HAMMERFALL's fifth studio album, "Chapter V: Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken" from 2005, became the band's fourth album to go gold in Sweden, while "Crimson Thunder" even went platinum, surpassing 60,000 sales in the group's home country.

In April 2023, HAMMERFALL released a special platinum edition of "Crimson Thunder" with tons of bonus material.

Photo credit: Tallee Savage (courtesy of Nuclear Blast)