IN THIS MOMENT Begins Work On New Material

Christine Caruana of Australia's Loud recently conducted an interview with vocalist Maria Brink of Southern California's IN THIS MOMENT. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Loud: Your latest release, "A Star-Crossed Wasteland", is very different from your previous releases, which is expected as you are an experimental band. Do you think it depicts the IN THIS MOMENT you've been working towards?

Maria: Yeah, I think we are definitely finding our defining sound. Like you said, we experiment a lot and we go from really melodic to really heavy, we're kind of all over the place, and I think we kind of collaborated a lot of aspects of our band in that album.

Loud: So writing for the new album has begun?

Maria: Yeah, we're slowly starting to write now. Slowly starting to dive into it, and it's really exciting, it's like starting all over again. I get so excited, just everything about it, the creation of it, the concept, everything.

Loud: "A Star-Crossed Wasteland" hinted at a concept album, do you think your next album will be a full concept album, or steering away from that idea this time?

Maria: I don't think so. I definitely do love the idea of having the loosely threaded concept theme to it, not the story from the beginning to the end, because I feel too constricted with my writing. I do like a loose story line that goes through an album because it's cool to write, and metaphorical, versus something like, "Oh, I'm really sad my boyfriend left me." It kind of gets old for me, so it's kind of cool to write my personal experiences in a story, metaphorically. I like that.

Loud: You do all the lyric writing for IN THIS MOMENT, correct?

Maria: Yeah, I write all the lyrics, and the melodies, but when it comes to the actual music, we all kind of do that together.

Loud: What inspires you the most, is it strictly personal experiences, or do other bands, movies and books play apart too?

Maria: It is a collaboration of all of those things. Definitely, whereever you are in life is going to influence your writing. Like if somebody you truly love just died, or you know, obviously how you're feeling strongly in your life is going to have an overtone in your album. I am influenced by art in general, in movies and visual things and other music of course. So it's kind of everything together. Then I find what I'd like the overall feel to the album to be like, then I go from there.

Loud: You are a big inspiration to other female metal and punk vocalists, as well as fans. Does that put a whole new world of pressure on you personally?

Maria: No, you never really feel like that personally. You're never like, "Oh, I'm an inspiration!" You know what I mean? [laughs] It definitely does somewhat, in some ways, like I get thousands of fans writing to me that maybe at one point they were suicidal and our music kind of gave them an inspiration. I write about dark things, but I always end it [that] there is a light at the end of a dark tunnel. So I personally don't want to write about things too morbid or dark, because you don't want to influence them completely in a dark way. But at the same time, I still want to be real and always have a balance between the dark and the light. So, I just have to be

Read the entire interview from Loud.