“I told you so.”

The members of Blackguard and their inner circle are taking a considerable amount of satisfaction in being able to throw those four words in the faces of the people that said the band would never get anywhere beyond the Quebec – Ontario club circuit. Formerly known as Profugus Mortis, the Montreal sextet has been going skull-to-grindstone for years seeking that fabled pot-of-gold record deal that will supposedly lead to bigger and better things, and if the hype by some of the band’s loudest supporters was to be believed Blackguard was destined and deserved to be the Next Big Thing. They are now officially in the running, as the band closed out 2008 by signing deals with Sumerian Records for North America and major league heavyweight Nuclear Blast for Europe. Far more important is the immediate support that came with the deals in the form of back-to-back North American support tours (Paganfest 2 and Summer Slaughter) with a trek through Europe planned for the autumn. It’s a dream situation that every serious band hopes and prays for, and one that frontman Paul Ablaze has been entertaining for a very long time.

“I don’t know if it’s actually hit home yet, to be completely honest with you,” he says of the Nuclear Blast deal, “and it’s weird because this has been going on since about October. It was super shocking at first, and obviously I’m really happy about it, but I think it’ll hit me when I see the CD in stores with the little Nuclear Blast logo on it. I think that’s when I’ll break down and cry or something (laughs). I get emails from the head office hooking me up with interviews and I’m like… hey, that’s the label I’ve been trying to get on for the past eight years (laughs).”

The contract did come at a price, however. Nuclear Blast came calling as the band was gearing up for the independent release of a six song EP entitled Another Round, which meant putting everything on hold and essentially eating the costs of their do-it-yourself promo plan.

“The label deal was the best thing to happen at the worst time,” Ablaze admits. “Two weeks before we’re supposed to release the EP, hyping it and getting great responses, we spent something like two grand on merchandise that was meant to promote it, and then Nuclear Blast happens. We’re like… fuck (laughs). Aside from being completely ecstatic, it was like ‘What the hell are we going to do with all this merchandise?’ I’m so in love with the new songs, and the reactions we were getting from the EP were incredible, so it kind of sucks that the lifespan of it was negative a couple of days, technically (laughs). But, I guess it was good enough to get us record deals with Nuclear Blast and Sumerian, so it couldn’t have been that bad.”

Blackguard’s first test as a major league act is the North American leg of Paganfest 2 alongside the likes of Korpiklaani and Primordial. For Blackguard the dream picks up speed seemingly with each passing day, but they’re prepared to take the challenge head on.

“It’s funny, because last year we half-jokingly talked about getting on the Paganfest tour,” laughs Ablaze, “and lo and behold here we are a year later and we’re doing it. We’ve done tours before but obviously nothing as extensive as what we’re about to get into, so I’d like to think that we’re not novices in this, but we’re far from being experts. Of course there’s going to be a huge adjustment, but we all know what that involves. We’re all very aware of the sacrifices that have to be made and we’re taking the proper steps now to make sure we’re as taken care of as humanly possible while we’re out being dirt poor on the road. I think we’re going to be able to pull through this without any problems. We’re all kinda smart, so we’ll figure out how to make this work (laughs).”

While the band gets used to the reality of spending a large portion of 2009 on the road, many fans are still adjusting to the name change from Profugus Mortis to Blackguard. It was a change Nuclear Blast insisted on for legal and marketing reasons, but Ablaze for one isn’t sorry to see the Profus Mortis moniker retired.

“For me it was super easy because me and a couple of the other guys in the band… I won’t say I hated the name Profugus Mortis, but it definitely wasn’t the greatest name in the world in my opinion. When I first joined the band I thought the name sucked by I loved the music, and some fans thought the same way, but when you start to build a reputation people see past the crappy name for a decent band. It was the same thing with Korn; that’s a dumb-ass name, but they made some waves at the beginning and people didn’t say anything about the name after a while.”

The obvious tip of the hat to their past was to call the new album Profugus Mortis. It was also a way of easing their established fanbase into the next chapter of the band’s career.

“We made a pretty half-decent fanbase as Profugus Mortis, so we didn’t think it would be too difficult to facillitate the name change, but we wanted to make it as least difficult as possible (laughs). It’s funny, because I think it was our drummer Justine who originally suggested we call the album Profugus Mortis, and then our manager backed it up a week later out of the blue. So yeah, it was a cool idea. What’s funny about that, too, is the name ‘Profugus Mortis’ means ‘Fugitives Of Death’, which coincidentally relates to the album cover. The whole story behind the cover is a bit of Quebec folklore about a group of lumberjacks that make a deal with the devil to go and see their families and party with their friends on New Year’s Eve. By the end of the story they’re quite literally running for their lives to satisfy their end of the deal so they don’t die. So, they’re the Fugitives Of Death; the connection’s there. It’s just a really weird coincidence how that worked out.”

With a record deal put on the table just as the Another Round EP was due to be released, the label was intent on releasing a full length album as the Blackguard debut. So, was it a mad scramble to get material together to fill things out?

“When we were first throwing around the idea of doing the EP, the intial idea was to do a full length record, but I was against putting out a full album on a small label,” Ablaze reveals. “I figured, if we’re going to do an album let’s wait another year and see if we can get it released on an international label. So, we did an EP thinking it wouldn’t take much time to get the songs together, but we also had all kinds of other demoed songs that Joe (Leduc / keyboards) had written and recorded at his home studio. That, in theory, made up a full length record. We figured we’d just leave them on the backburner until it was time to bust ‘em out and record them. Once the deal started going down and they said they needed a full length record by this date, we got down to recording those songs. It wasn’t so bad because even though those songs were demos, they were more than just skeletons of the songs when we got down to recording them. It could have been a hell of a lot worse.”

Once inside, the debut serves up the expected high speed folk metal-isms that forged the band’s enduring reputation, but there are unexpected forays into the realms of Megadeth thrash and Korpiklaani humppa-metal. New characteristics that are being viewed overall as positive.

“A lot of people have said that’s it’s not the typical folk metal thing,” says Ablaze. “The general concensus is that there’s something to it that makes it stand out, which is really cool. That’s probably the biggest compliment anyone can pay us, because it means we can carve our own little spot out in this genre.“

The one glaring change for some fans will be the lack of violins on the album. A dominant element in the Profugus Mortis sound, violinist Emilie Livernois was given the boot in 2008 and replaced by guitarist Kim Gosselin. Smart money is on Blackguard having to deal with a certain amount of trash talk as a result.

“You know, there were some smart ass people that made some really dumb comments about that. There were a couple people saying ‘I’ll never see this band again now that the tits are gone…’ – really stupid, immature stuff like that – and that the violin was the band, but fuck that. If you’re saying that you didn’t like the band very much to begin with. Yes, the violin was a somewhat significant part of the sound, but taking it away didn’t change our live presentation. It was never like we had to do a stylistic 180 because the violin was gone. So nothing really changed, but people were kind of spooked at the beginning and figured it wasn’t going to be the same band at all. Some people wrote us off, and look what happened (laughs).”

And with everything that’s coming Blackguard’s way this year, Ablaze freely admits nervousness is a factor.

“Yeah, it is. I was talking to our manager about some of the other tours in planning and I’m thinking ‘Man, I’m not gonna be home for a long time…’ (laughs). I’m starting to feel it, I’m starting to realize it’s actually happening. This really has become my career. The things I’ve been pursuing for the past eight years are finally happening for real. I know I said at the beginning of the interview that it hasn’t quite hit me, but it is trickling in there. Slowly. I’m guessing it’s some kind of a subconcious safeguard so I don’t freak out and go live at a bar for a couple weeks (laughs).”

Rest assured, once the live-and-in-your-face mayhem campaign, begins that nervousness won’t amount to more than minor pangs of indigestion. The stage, after all, is where Blackguard made their name.

“That’s one thing we want to stress and it’s always been really important to the band as long as I’ve been in it,” says Ablaze. “We know we have to put on a good show and we work hard on it. Not only for the fans, but for us as well because if I’m just standing there with my feet nailed to the ground I’m not having a good time. The other guys feel the same way, so the attitude when we go out there is that we’re going to make things as fun for us and for the crowd as humanly possible, and it’s paid off. All the compliments that people pay us… thank you. We work damn hard at it and I’m happy people can appreciate it. I can’t wait to take the show out to an international audience.”