IN FLAMES Singer: 'We Never Claimed To Own Any Genre Or Anything'

Jason Macneil of TorontoSun.com recently conducted an interview with IN FLAMES vocalist Anders Fridn. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

On the song "The Chosen Pessimist", a winding eight-minute tune different than anything IN FLAMES had done before:

"We had many ideas and just brought eight or nine different instrumental pieces (together). I told the guys to just give me an hour where I put them in order to get a nice flow. That song was just a constant process from the whole studio sessions.

"We had done slow songs, we had done ballad type of songs but we never done something like that. We usually have a formula that we write from, a kind of normal pop formula where it's verse-chorus-verse-solo. But this was something else."

On the recording process for the new IN FLAMES album, "A Sense Of Purpose":

"We recorded it altogether in a way, we have our own studio now and it was just a great creative process. The last three albums we've kind of divided into different studios and not all being there at the same time. This one was so much better. We would go through every song and try out sh-t with different microphones and amps to get a nice warm analog feeling to the whole thing.

On the fact that the band doesn't play a lot of its early material live:

"When you play live, you really see the strength of a song. We don't play so much of the older material anymore because we were super nave when we got into this with the recording process. We put layers and layers of guitar on the earlier albums and we were like, 'Oh sh-t, we have to produce this live. Fk we're only five people and we have two guitar players.'"

On people trying to pigeonhole the band's sound, occasionally dubbed "melodic death metal":

"People try to say that IN FLAMES is this or IN FLAMES is that but we never claimed to own any genre or anything. We just wanted to create a good heavy metal album and just go with it."