By Andrew Bansal
Over the past decade, Swedish traditional heavy metal band Enforcer have delivered music that has made a longlasting impact on lovers of the genre, and their fourth studio album ‘From Beyond’, already released in Europe and the UK and set for a US release on April 7th via Nuclear Blast, is another feather in their cap and serves up ten righteous new compositions that enhance and intensify the band’s ever-strenghtening musical arsenal. ‘From Beyond’ promises to be the ultimate heavy metal album of the modern era in every way imaginable. Last week, I spoke to vocalist/guitarist/primary songwriter Olof Wikstrand to discuss the ideas behind the music and artwork that eventually made it onto the album, his thoughts on the new generation of old-school bands, touring plans and more. Enjoy the conversation below.
Olof, it’s good to have you again on Metal Assault. I thought your previous album ‘Death By Fire’ was your best work at the time it was released. After that, did you have any aim or mindset in terms of what you wanted to achieve with ‘From Beyond’?
I think we were very satisfied with that album, in terms of songwriting, production and everything. So, basically we just wanted to push things even further. We wanted to do the fast songs even faster, the heavy stuff heavier, and get a little more variety. Those were the basic ideas we had before we started writing. We wanted to take things to a new level.
And I think you’ve done that. On ‘Death By Fire’, I thought it had more guitar work than the albums before that, and ‘From Beyond’ has even more guitar harmonies and things like that. Do you agree?
Oh yeah, it has been one of the basic foundations of our sound from the very beginning, and the more we can integrate it, the better!
You always obviously stick to a similar style in terms of old-school metal driven by guitar harmonies and clean vocals, but there is the challenge to not get repetitive, as you progress in your career from album to album. Do you think about that when you’re writing music?
Of course, it is a challenge, but I’m always listening to new things and I get inspired from them. I would say I never limit myself in a way that would prevent me from doing anything new. You have to develop. If you’re just trying to copy what you did in the beginning of your career, things will only get worse and worse.
People that have been listening to you from the beginning have to be able to distinguish the songs from each album and it shouldn’t all sound the same.
Yeah, but in the end it’s us, the band ourselves that’s the ultimate judge of what goes through and what doesn’t. When we’re writing or recording, we don’t really think about what people would do with it. We do whatever we feel is right and what we think is good. What people think about it is totally secondary.
You always include an instrumental track in your albums, which is very old-school Iron Maiden style. It must be a kind of release for you. You just let yourselves go and play whatever comes to you.
Oh yeah, we like the idea and we’ve been fond of it from the very beginning. It’s a tradition that’s been with us ever since. Back then, it was done to get something special going according to the flow of the record, as well as we wanted to have something to play live so that I could rest my voice, which wasn’t very good in the beginning. So it’s just stuck with us. It contributes a lot when you’re listening to the album in a flow.
Do you play these instrumentals live, still?
In some shows but more and more rarely, I would say. We haven’t even thought about doing ‘Hungry They Will Come’ in the live set, because last time I thought ‘Crystal Suite’ was the best instrumental we had done but it didn’t work out very well live as compared to the songs with vocals. The audience wasn’t really into it. So we’ll see how people react on the new stuff. And also right now, I don’t really have the same problems I had in the beginning where I couldn’t sing for very long and needed a ten-minute break in the set. My voice has definitely got stronger since then.
Is that just through practice and playing shows?
Yeah, I don’t keep track of how many shows we do, but now, ten years into our career, we’ve done lots of shows. So yeah, it has just come through practice.
The cover artwork for this new album is easily the best one you’ve had so far, I think. Who did that and what was your input?
We had a very basic concept of it. We tried asking a few artists to do something, but we ended up using an illustration that a friend of mine from Canada did, a friend who did some t-shirt prints for us before that we really liked. So, we sent this illustration to another friend from Sweden who does most of our designs. He framed it and put it together, and the actual outcome of it is something I’m really happy with. He has a talent for framing things, and he made the drawing by our friend in Canada into something really cool.
Right, so throughout the last year this is one thing I’ve been wondering about you the most. Two of your members Joseph and Jonas have done a Black Trip record. It went really well for them and it’s a great album. What do you think of that whole thing? Was it ever discussed with you, about them doing a side-project?
Well, we don’t rehearse every day and we don’t play every day, unfortunately, so there’s plenty of time to do whatever you want. I think it only shows that there are very creative persons within the band with lots of music in ourselves, and I strongly support that!
That’s awesome, man. It gives people something to listen to when Enforcer is not doing anything.
Yeah, exactly!
Enforcer started out more like a one-man thing for you, at least in terms of songwriting. How has that changed for you over the years? Would you still call it your thing?
Oh, it has totally changed. It was a one-man thing only for the first year or so, before we were an actual band. Basically, I was in a couple of thrash/black/death metal bands earlier. In one of those bands we did some Venom covers and in the other band we did some Exciter covers. I was really fascinated about the sheer amount of energy when we did those songs live. So I sort of put an idea in the back of my mind to do something like that. A few years later this idea actually materialized into a concept, couple of songs, band name, logo, and very rough ideas. I recorded these songs by myself and never intended to have any band. But it was very successful online and I surpassed my other bands. I was getting offered record deals, shows, festivals and all that, but I had absolutely no band. So I asked Jonas and Adam to fill in for me, we practiced a little bit, and it was really good. That was the birth of the band, and here we are, ten years and four albums later!
There’s a lot of younger bands these days, bands that have been around for as long as you and for a lesser number of years as well. Do you think of it as a good thing to have other bands and be part of a movement, or would you rather be the sole flag-bearer of old-school metal?
It’s hard to say. To be quite honest with you, I don’t listen much to other new heavy metal bands. I think most new young bands are too stuck up with staying too much within the rules, too much by the book. They lose their identity a little bit. May be people see us like that too. That’s not how I see it. Also, when bands label themselves ‘heavy metal’, they are telling themselves what they can and can’t do. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all new bands, and there are some good ones as well. I can’t really see that we are part of any movement. When we started this band, we were totally unaware of any other new band on the planet that was playing the orthodox, real kind of metal at that time, in the early 2000s.
That’s an interesting point of view. Lastly, this album is out in Europe and the UK and is coming out soon in the US. What touring plans do you have?
Touring as much as possible is the plan. We have a European tour in the fall, festivals in the summer before that, and North America next January-February. And then South America, Asia and may be Australia. We’ll see, I hope it’s a really busy year and we get a chance to tour every possible country in the world.
Related: Enforcer ‘From Beyond’ album review
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