MESHUGGAH's Mårten Hagström: "We Wanted To Get Back To The Sheer Intensity Of What We Do"
January 18, 2008, 16 years ago
MTV.com has issued the following report from Chris Harris and Jon Wiederhorn
It's been three long years since we've heard anything new from MESHUGGAH, but on March 11th, the Swedish experimental-metallers return with what's maybe the first metal album of 2008 that deserves a solid listen. The follow-up to 2005's Catch Thirty-Three, obZen is the product of a year's worth of writing and marks something of a regression for the band, according to guitarist Mårten Hagström.
"We had this vision to make a dense album that was going back to the old songwriting structure we'd been using, where it'd have songs that were linked to each other by a common thread but still had a different identity," he explained."Now, listening back to the album, that's something I think is the best part of the album, that we pulled that off and managed to get the diversity in there - if you can call what we're doing 'diverse,' with the kind of aggression that's involved. But we aimed to make an album that had that severe, aggressive quality to it. We wanted to get back to the sheer intensity of what we do, but really, it was all a semiconscious thing for us.
"I think this album's a little more direct than the previous ones," he continued. "It's more back to the in-your-face brutality of our older records and has a lot of qualities of what we've done over our career."
Read the full story at MTV.com.
