Greece's Rockpages spoke with HAMMERFALL vocalist Joacim Cans about the band's new album, Infected, and the band's career so far. An excerpt follows:

Q: From what I’ve heard so far of the new album, Infected, it sounds darker, maybe darker than you ever sounded before. How did this come up?

A: "I don’t know really! In my opinion the new album is the start of something maybe the next decade of Hammerfall, more or less. We needed to make some changes in order to make it interesting for ourselves because in the end if we are not happy the music is not going to be good! That’s the way it is. We need to be happy, and in order to do that we need to be able to change the sound a little bit, to be able make some changes within the music. And the important thing is that whatever we decide to do we can never betray what Hammerfall is in the first place. We have the main core in the music, being Hammerfall. Maybe, the rawer guitar sound that we have on this album makes it a bit darker. We want the sound to be bigger than ever before, but we couldn’t add anything to the music, because we had too many things going on. So, we decided to remove stuff instead! Instead of having four guitars playing at the same time we have one left, one right, and the vocals dead center, without too much effects like delay, or reverb. So, this is more like letting the instruments, and letting us do our jobs! I don’t know if it’s darker because of the lyrical themes, or the way the compositions were made, but in a song like 'Dia De Los Muertos', after the last chorus it goes down to something really deep, and dark, but that’s the way for us to express ourselves in a different way."

Read the full interview at this location.

Hammerfall have announced the first dates for their upcoming European Outbreak 2011 tour, set to launch this October.

Guitarist Oscar Dronjak comments: "Beginning on October 25th and ending on December 10th, we will embark on the real tour for Infected. Dubbed European Outbreak, this will show the very best side of HammerFall, we've got some very cool things in the pipeline for this tour! So hope you see you all at the shows, it will be a blast! And that's guaran-damned-teed!"

Confirmed dates currently include:

October

31 - Hamburg, Germany - Große Freiheit

November

1 - Antwerp, Belgium - Trix
2 - Filderstadt, Germany - Filharmonie
4 - Oberhausen, Germany - Turbinenhalle

5 - Paris, France - Bataclan

6 - Esch-Sur-Alzette, Luxembourg - Rockhal
7 - Zurich, Switzerland - Volkhaus
9 - Vienna, Austria - Arena @
10 - Graz, Austria - Orpheum
11 - Milan, Italy - Magazinni Generali
12 - München, Germany - Theaterfabrik
15 - Warzaw, Poland - Stodola
16 - Berlin, Germany - Huxleys
17 - Tilburg, Netherlands - 013
18 - Köln, Germany - Essigfabrik
27 - Trencin, Slovakia - Piano
28 - Budapest, Hungary - Petöfi Hall
30 - Bucharest, Romania - Hard Rock Café

December

1 - Belgrade, Serbia - SKC
2 - Zagreb, Croatia - Boogaloo
3 - Ljubljana, Slovenia - Siska
4 - Passau, Germany - Dreiländerhalle
9 - Porto, Portugal - Hard Club

More dates to be announced. Stay tuned for updates.