RockMyMonkey.com recently caught up with HAMMERFALL frontman Joacim Cans to discuss the band's new album, Threshold. The following is a brief excerpt:

Rock My Monkey: There seems to be a much bigger buzz in American for this release than any Hammerfall release before it. Why do you think that is?

Joacim Cans: "I have no idea. Maybe we put so much pressure on the label now that they had to do something (laughs). I don’t know. I think that since we are actually here in person doing promotion, I think it’s so much easier to create some attention for this release. Since we have a market all over the world, you cannot really be at every place at the same time. So this time around we set off the four or five days to actually come here to meet some people in person, and have a nice bed in the hotel room doing a phoner. And hopefully we’ve got people who like the new album."

Rock My Monkey: Who came up with the decision to make this CD less polished and more raw than more recent Hammerfall releases?

Joacim Cans: "I think that was a combination of Oscar, myself, and Charlie Bauerfeind, the producer. We wanted the previous album, Chapter V, to have this type of polished sound, more of a lavish feeling, but somehow, I don’t know if we lost it along the way, and it became a little more polished than we wanted it to be. On this new album, I think we knew how-there was a lot of frustration going on in the studio. Just setting the guitar sounds took a whole day. Then of course we had a heat wave in Denmark when we recorded the album, so the air conditioning system broke down, and that led to the computers to crash. It took us two days to fix everything. And it took us two days to fix everything, and we were behind schedule, and were really frustrated. But I think we converted this frustration into something good. I think that is one of the main factors, why you have this more rough album."

Rock My Monkey: Was there a conscious effort to stray away from the typical medieval storylines that Hammerfall is more known for on this album?

Joacim Cans: "I think it’s also like a natural progress, I would say. Ten years ago when we wrote the debut album, it was more of these kind of topics I wanted to write about. This more medieval-I was really into King Arthur stories. I was reading a lot about that. At that point I thought that was the only thing I wanted to write about. Nowadays, I don’t even feel like writing that anymore. I’m ten years older. When you get older, you look at life and you look at things in a different way. And I always said that the only limitations that you have as a writer is your own imagination. I just try to come up with things myself. I just think, okay, what does this song tell me when I listen to the music, and then the vocals, and then I just go from there. And it feels like since a lot of this happy-happy elements-in quotations ‘happy’-like 'The Dragon Lies Bleeding', a lot of bands like early HELLOWEEN, music like that, since we don’t have those happy elements anymore. I feel the darker lyrics on this album suits better to the music."

To read the entire interview go to this location.