Radio Metal has just published an interview of THERION mainman Christofer Johnsson, talking about their latest self-released album Les Fleurs Du Mal, their opera-rock project, admitting their music style is becoming out of fashion.

Here is an excerpt:

Q: In the end, if a band like Therion has to make the albums they want to make without the support of a label and actually succeed at it, isn’t it

the sign that somehow labels are becoming less and less useful?

A: "We are a pretty unique case. We’ve built up a trademark over the years. We could never have done this if we’d been around with just a few records. That’s one thing. The other thing is that we may have more loyal fans than regular metal bands. We’re a weird band, and we’ve changed styles so much from record to record. They might be more open-minded than regular metal fans. For most bands, it would be very risky to do something completely different. To Therion fans, it’s like: 'Yeah, good! It’s a crazy band that always does something different!' That gives us an advantage over many other bands. Sure, many bands have very loyal fans, but if you consider than many fans have followed our entire career, from when we were a death metal band to where we are now… If they already have fourteen albums by Therion, why wouldn’t they buy the fifteenth? It would have to suck so fucking bad for them not to buy it! In my view, the most important thing was to make the album heard and available. It’s not like we need to push a Therion album upon the fans: either they want it, or they don’t. You just need to expose them to it. Since I didn’t have money left for promotion, I relied on Internet very much. I had a strategy where I made sure there was absolutely no leak. Nobody had the record before, there was no advertisement, and nobody knew anything. There were rumors that there would be a record, but nobody knew for sure what it would be called or when it would be released. Then, a few days before the tour, we announced that it would be sold straight to the fans. Nobody heard it before the first show. When the fans came to the first show, some of them bought the record and put it up on Internet. I’ve learned something over the years: those who have a negative opinion are always the fastest to write. They always exaggerate, they only complain: 'It’s like the sky is falling on our heads, the band is doomed! Everything is shit, the members have gone insane!' It got me thinking about the way I reacted to Metallica’s Lulu, which I think is a shit album, by the way. It was like: 'It’s LOU REED with METALLICA, so it can’t be good! And it’s called Lulu, for fuck’s sake, this has to be awful!' I read all those negative comments, which said it was the worst singing ever, and it made me curious: 'What the fuck? I really need to hear this now, quick!' So I figured, if Therion did a cover album of old French songs, people would buy that, if only because they’d think: 'What the fuck? I need to hear this!' With all the doomsters saying: 'Oh, no, they finally snapped, this is terrible! It’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, worst than Metallica’s Lulu!', everybody on the planet with an Internet connection, even remotely interested in hearing a Therion album, would be like: 'Fuck, I need to hear this!' So we used the jungle drums of Internet to reach out quickly to people: 'Hey, there’s a record available.' It worked really well. The sales are pretty good, people are buying like fucking nuts over the mail-order, and they’ve bought a lot at the concerts. It wouldn’t work as well for a regular album, a record that wouldn’t make people threaten publicly to commit suicide or something. We wouldn’t get the same jungle-drums effect. It was a way of exploiting all these bitter, negative, exaggerating people on internet. All the bad reviews and negative writing we’ve had initially were a very good promotion. Of course, in the long run, you want positive comments, you want people to like the record. But when the first thing people read on the internet is that it’s an absolute catastrophe, they just feel: “I have to hear this myself”. I had arranged to have three videos released on the same day, so it would be a lot of things to watch. People tend to watch videos with images more easily than they listen to the audio. I also made sure the videos were a bit spectacular, so there would be something more to talk about. We just had a very safe method to get free promotion. I don’t know how much money it would have been worth if it’d been a promotional campaign. I think getting people to talk about you is something you cannot really buy. No matter how many adverts you buy in every metal magazine, it cannot create the same amount of promotion as you get from people talking about you. That’s how an underground band can become very big, when they’re on everybody’s lips. Especially a band like Therion, who’s getting a bit old. Our music style is getting a bit out of fashion, so it’s really good if we can get people to talk about us. The worst thing that can happen is if you become some sort of fucking STATUS QUO band. Sure, people like them, and they’re happy when they see a new album, but nobody really talks about them. We don’t want to sell records only to the most loyal fans, we want to be a band that always challenges the listener. Either people like it or not, at least they have an interest in it."

Q: You made an announcement regarding the fact that there won’t be a regular Therion album or a regular tour for a few years because you’re working on a metal rock opera. Aren’t you afraid, in the current world where everything goes so fast, that people will simply forget Therion in the meantime?

A: "On the contrary, I would think. Our music style is becoming out of fashion at the moment. So instead of flooding the market with lots of records that only the die-hard fans are interested in, from a business point of view, I think it’s much smarter to focus on a big project that will create a lot of buzz around it. It’s better to have fewer projects that attract a lot of attention. Eventually, the nostalgic fans will come back anyway. And all of a sudden, you’re paid double and headline all the festivals! (laughs) Everything seems to go in cycles. You can see how it was with heavy metal: in the 80s, it was shit, and all of a sudden, everybody wanted to hear heavy metal again. There was a new generation of bands coming up, like HAMMERFALL, and all the bands that were big before the '80s played even bigger stadiums. When there’s a new trend, what you’re doing becomes very “un-hip”. The people who still listen to your music are getting older, having families, working at the bank, getting bald, whatever. They may not read metal magazines all the time, go to all the concerts, or buy the record the day it’s released. You have an audience with a lot of capital, which is good. They don’t have to worry that they can’t buy the new record. When you give a concert, you sell the same amount of merchandise, even if you pull half the amount of people. But since you don’t fill the pyramid from underneath, with young people, you get disconnected from the scene a little bit, which is of course the boring part."

Read the entire interview here.