NILE's KARL SANDERS On New Album: 'Everyone Can Find Something To Enjoy On This Record'

Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal of Metal Assault recently conducted an interview with Karl Sanders of outh Carolina-based extreme technical death metallers NILE. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Assault: The new [NILE] album, "At The Gate Of Sethu", is coming out in a few weeks. I was listening to it, and I think it's a bit more organic than your previous couple of albums. So would you say that it's more like an early-era NILE album in many ways?

Sanders: I'd say, yes. That's true. There are a lot of old elements incorporated along with the newer ones. We wanted to do things compositionally that would appeal to NILE fans no matter which kind of NILE fan it is, whether it be the older NILE fan or the newer fan. Everyone can find something to enjoy on this new record.

Metal Assault: As for your own vocals, do you think it's naturally changed over the past few albums?

Sanders: Well, I hadn't been doing too much vocals on recent albums, so that is one thing we wanted to change. Everybody in the band was of the opinion that we should make better use of my vocals. On this album, there are some vocal styles that I haven't used on NILE records in a while. We're also now using Todd Ellis as our third vocalist, so we wanted to expand on the vocals with this album, to try and put in a bit more variation. Of course, there are death metal vocals on this record, but there's also the mid-range kind of sound. And there's also a little bit more clean stuff. So I think you can definitely say that we've gone in with more variation on the vocals this time.

Metal Assault: In terms of the artwork, I honestly feel this is the best album cover that NILE has put out. What was the process behind designing the artwork. Was it like your thoughts being translated by the artist?

Sanders: When our drummer George Kollias told us that the artist Seth Siro Anton was interested in doing the cover for the record, we were very excited. I, in particular have been a SEPTICFLESH fan for many, many long years. And since Seth has worked with that band, I thought this was a really great idea to have him on board for our album. We gave him the lyrics, let him hear the music, and he came up with the ideas on his own, and I was like, "Fuck yeah! Just do whatever you want!" And it turned out great.

Metal Assault: After the previous album was released, you guys have toured a lot, probably more than ever before. Did that make it hard to write this new album or was it just a usual thing for you?

Sanders: We don't write songs while we're on tour, so in that respect it was kind of like, we had to wait till we finished touring to start the writing. By the end of the touring cycle, I in particular was not very healthy, and was suffering from tour sickness. When you're always touring, you can never get rid of the tour sickness. It just keeps getting worse. So after we completed the last European tour, I took a month to rest, and then I started writing songs in May of 2011. I kept working on that, and finally we finished the record in March of this year. So it took ten months from the start of songwriting to the end of mixing.

Read the entire interview from Metal Assault.

"The Inevitable Degradation Of Flesh" audio stream:

"The Fiends Who Come To Steal The Magick Of The Deceased" lyric video:

Digipack:

Jewel case: