DIMMU BORGIR's Galder - "We Never Claimed To Be A Traditional Black Metal Band"

October 29, 2010, 14 years ago

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Radio Metal has just published an interview with Galder from Norwegian black metallers DIMMU BORGIR. Here's an excerpt from the chat:

Radio Metal: The song 'Gateways' doesn’t have that much typical black metal screams. Many purists were already criticizing the band, saying you don’t play black metal anymore. With that kind of song, you’re comforting them in their position. What’s your vision on this?

Galder: They’re right, we don’t play traditional black metal, but we never claimed to be a traditional black metal band. When Stormblåst came out, people said it wasn’t black metal – and in a way, it wasn’t, because it had keyboards and was very symphonic. We just make the music we think is cool; we don’t make music to make a certain group of people happy. We like what we do, and we like to have different elements from metal in our music. Symphonic black metal is the best word to describe it, it’s definitely not old school black metal.

Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia is really a cornerstone in the band’s discography, as it propelled the band to a higher level. The two following albums were more or less in a similar vein. Do you think Abrahadabra could be the next step, the next cornerstone for the band?

I totally agree. Puritanical is one of my favourite Dimmu albums, it took the band in a totally new direction. But even when that album came out, people were totally shocked and went: 'What? This is not Dimmu!' People need time to get used to new stuff. I think this new album is a lot better than the previous one. It’s a more complete album, you can tell we worked hard on it. Of course, there are people who are not going to like everything about it, but it’s always been like that. It’s a step in the direction we want to go. We’re always open to try out new ideas, so the next album might be a lot faster than this one, for example. We never know what we’re gonna do. But we do feel it’s a step in the right direction.

The release of Puritanical coincided with your arrival in the band. Do you feel somehow responsible for putting the band on a higher level?

I contributed a lot to that album. I made it more technical than it was, more guitar-ish, maybe. It was my first approach, but I don’t really know if I contributed to anything, even if I had something to say with that album."

Read the entire interview here.


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