Metal-Rules.com has issued a new interview with EDGUY guitarist Jens Ludwig. An excerpt follows:

Q: How do you overall see the state of German metal?

A: "I think it’s pretty much alive, I would call it that. I mean, it was never really gone. It’s just that, you know, it’s just trends that say “power metal is dead” or trends and media that say “power metal is back” because they want to promote a new power metal band or something. For me it was never really gone. There was a period when there were less bands, like the beginning of the 90s, for example, there were less bands generally, so we just had bands like RUNNING WILD, RAGE, GRAVE DIGGER, GAMMA RAY and HELLOWEEN, and that was it. Nowadays we have, like, 50 different, other bands. But that’s a development you can see in every style of music and every country in the world, that more and more bands are appearing and more and more bands releasing albums."

Q: But you mentioned the old bands like Grave Digger, Running Wild, the older generation of German heavy metal but I guess Edguy’s more like modern-day band of the German metal. But what do you see... do you think that German metal bands are a little bit stuck in Germany because most metal bands which are breaking nowadays are coming from Sweden or even Finland?

A: "Well, you’re right but are there so many really big new heavy metal bands coming from Scandinavia?

Q: If we can say that Nightwish...

A: "But they have been around for 15 years already, haven’t they? And they started off supporting Rage in Germany. So it’s not what I’d call a new band. All those bands you’re talking about like Nightwish or like [us], we started when there was... at least the music industry wasn’t totally destroyed. You know what I mean? And there were much less bands back then, and it was just easier... not easier... yeah it was easier to get attention. Nowadays it’s really difficult to get attention of fans, of media, of everything, because there are just so many things going on."

Read the full interview at this location.