Interview for Radiostation
English interview  
(NL)
Klokradio
After their "Shadowlord empire" MCD Shadowlord recently released their first full-length album "Scourge of heaven". This album filled with complex yet fast and powerful black metal is another pearl in the growing mountain of excellent Dutch releases. Reason enough to send them a mail to get more information about this great band.

Congratulations with your cool second album. Could you please tell something about it?

Thanks for your compliments. We recorded the album in Wijchen at the New Roads studio and we were very pleased with that. Because we only had 2 weeks to finish the recordings we’re very satisfied with the final result. And it got very positive reviews from the press.

Unfortunately I’ve never been able to listen to your first MCD. To what extent is it different from this full lenght album?

Well, it differs in some respects. At that time the line-up was only together for a few months and we weren’t that used to each other as on "Scourge of heaven". We had some old songs available which have been completed with keyboards and new lyrics, so these songs were to everyone’s satisfaction and suitable to be recorded. We recorded the songs in just one weekend and the final result turned out to be much better than we expected, so State off Art Records released the songs as a MCD. Comparing "Shadowlord empire" and "Scourge of heaven" one will notice that the first one sounds merely as straight forward, back to basic black metal. On "Scourge of heaven" it’s more obvious that we wrote the songs together as a band and the songs fit better. We also spend more time on recording and producing the album and you can hear that as well.

Your style can easily be described as (Satyricon-like) black metal but also consists of many other influences. How do you write these rather complex songs and to what extent have the new members Marit Pietersen and Daphne Alberda been able to contribute to the songs?

Everybody can contribute to the songs and bring ideas for songs but it’s a fact that most songs on both the previous album as on "Scourge of heaven" have been written by the guitar players Lesley and Richèl and keyboard player Dave. Because the band members like various styles of music the songs contain a mix of styles as well. The songs we write at the moment are more guitar orientated but nevertheless Daphne and Marit have been able to contribute. They have some other musical preferences and this definitely will have a positive influence on the new album.

Looking at the track list I got the impression that the album has been divided in 3 parts and that it may be a concept album. Reading the lyrics I didn’t notice this however and I also couldn’t find much about the concept on your site. Could you please tell us something about a possible concept and the lyrics in general?

You could say that 3 separate concepts have been combined on one album. The first chapter has been called "Historia". The songs in this chapter deal about the history of Nijmegen. With this topic we continu with the theme we had on our first album "Shadowlord Empire" . The title of the second chapter is "Indictus", which means "unspoken", and deals with the dark sides of religion. The last chapter is called "Cantus Lugubris" (which means "dirge") and fits the death related trilogy very well. You could consider the whole album as the story of the "Shadowlord".

Last question: many Dutch bands release the one excellent album after the other but face many difficulties finding a tour or even gigs. Have you faced the same difficulties and where can we see Shadowlord during the next months?

Our next show takes place in Amsterdam together with Katafalk and Monastery. During the last years we did about 75 shows with well-known and less known bands and I think this is not a bad number for a Dutch band. The problem is that you always have to deal with the larger booking agencies and record labels, which provide for their own opening acts, leaving only few possibilities for starting bands. So we’re very glad we have a manager arranging everything for us. If you wanna have more information about Shadowlord, please check our website www.shadowlord.nl or mail to thefirstshadowlord@hotmail.com

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