Metal Shock Finland's Alison Booth recently spoke with Chen Balbus, guitarist of oriental metal pioneers Orphaned Land. A few excerpts follow:

On the subject of Orphaned Land breaking boundaries of racial and religious divide, Chen explained: “Yeah, pretty much every time we go in concerts we’re asking ‘alright, we’re Orphaned Land from Israel, are there any Muslims, Arabic people in the crowd? Lift your flags, tell us where you’re from’. You just see like, people coming from countries that are pretty much our neighbour countries like Lebanon, Syria, Egypt. All of those countries are like an hour drive from where I live and I can never actually visit there, but I see those guys in other countries. So it’s something that our politicians and all those ambassadors could never achieve with all that money they got there and all those fancy talks at the UN and we just did it with goddamn heavy metal! ”

On what’s coming up for the band after the summer, Chen revealed: “We’re gonna plan the next leg of the European tour, maybe do some new locations, pretty much working on it right now. We’re already actually writing the new album as we speak. We don’t wanna let people wait five years again, so we better start. There are a couple of tracks here and there, like snippets, but we’ll get to there eventually - first we gotta rock the world!”

Listen to the interview here.

Orphaned Land perform next on May 5th at Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, New York. Find the band's live itinerary here.

(Photo - Zohar Ron / Zoharon - Photography)