MESHUGGAH Guitarist: 'We Wanted To Get Back To The Sheer Intensity Of What We Do'

January 18, 2008

Guitarist Mårten Hagström of the Swedish experimental extreme metallers MESHUGGAH recently spoke to MTV.com about the group's forthcoming CD, "obZen", due in Germany on March 7, 2008 via Nuclear Blast Records (with the U.S. on March 11). The follow-up to 2005's "Catch Thirty Three" will contain nine songs and will have a running time of around 55 minutes.

"We had this vision to make a dense album that was going back to the old songwriting structure we'd been using, where it'd have songs that were linked to each other by a common thread but still had a different identity," he explained. "Now, listening back to the album, that's something I think is the best part of the album, that we pulled that off and managed to get the diversity in there — if you can call what we're doing 'diverse,' with the kind of aggression that's involved. But we aimed to make an album that had that severe, aggressive quality to it. We wanted to get back to the sheer intensity of what we do, but really, it was all a semiconscious thing for us.

"I think this album's a little more direct than the previous ones," he continued. "It's more back to the in-your-face brutality of our older records and has a lot of qualities of what we've done over our career."

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