SOILWORK Guitarist Talks About The Making Of 'Sworn To A Great Divide'

MetalSucks recently sat down with guitarist Ola Frenning of Swedish metal kings SOILWORK mere hours before their sold-out show at New York City's Hammerstein Ballroom with KILLSWITCH ENGAGE, LAMB OF GOD, and DEVILDRIVER. Frenning talked about the tour, the band's new album "Sworn to a Great Divide", self-producing for the first time, the sudden exit of guitarist and songwriter Peter Wichers, future touring plans and more. An excerpt from the chat follows:

MetalSucks: How does it feel to be back on the road again after taking a break for so long to record the new album?

Frenning: It's fun, definitely. We were waiting for this. We had a long, long break while we were writing the songs and recording the album and so on. We just made one European tour, and this is actually the first tour promoting the new album.

MetalSucks: Speaking of the new album "Sworn to a Great Divide", how do you feel about that album as it stacks up against past SOILWORK?

Frenning: I'm very satisfied and happy with the album, definitely. We chose to record it back home, in our hometown so to say. All the previous albums we always went away to a studio some place else, and we had X amount of weeks that we were working. This time we just took it a little bit easy, and we produced a little bit more by ourselves. We also tried to have a little bit more dirty sound on this album, compared to the other ones. "Stabbing" ["Stabbing the Drama", 2005] was a little bit polished, that deep heavy sound and so on, and we just tried to get a little bit closer, down to earth sound. That's a little bit different compared to the others.

MetalSucks: How was it producing yourselves? You also produced with Peter from DARKANE, right?

Frenning: Yeah. It was a tough job. I don't know if I am gonna do it again! I guess a little… at least I will try to do it. But, um… we learned that we need a lot of time, a lot of breaks. You can't record the album, and the day after start to do the mix. So we need to have weeks, or months… a couple of weeks off before we start to mix it, because you're so into it and you hear the wrong things.

MetalSucks: Did you mix it yourselves too?

Frenning: Yeah, we mixed it and produced it.

MetalSucks: Except, of course, for Björn ["Speed" Strid] who did his vocals with Devin Townsend. He prefers to work with Devin, who, of course, did the "Natural Born Chaos" album?

Frenning: Devin is doing a great job with Björn. He really gets the best out of him. We were talking about Devin before we started this album. Everyone could chose what they wanted to do, and how they wanted to do it and so on… at that time we were actually out on tour with FEAR FACTORY, STRAPPING YOUNG LAD, and DARKANE, on the US tour. So, they started to discuss and all of a sudden they decided that OK, they'll do the vocals together.

MetalSucks: What was the writing process like for this album? Obviously you guys replaced a guitarist [Peter Wichers] who was also a big writer for the band, so what was it like writing without him in the band? Was it a challenge?

Frenning: Eh, a little bit maybe… but we knew that everybody in the band can write music, and everybody wrote music. If you look at our early albums, the whole band was more involved. I guess it came a little bit naturally that Peter started to write more and more, because Peter, you know, he's a fast songwriter and a good songwriter of course. So it was a little bit of a struggle in the beginning, but after we made the first song and we felt that "Wow, this is kind of cool," and "Exile" was one of the first we made. And then we felt that there was a little more confidence… continuity… and also, this time the whole band was more involved.

Read the entire interview at www.metalsucks.net.