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IN MOURNING

Maybe first off for the people who might not know the band a little introduction?
The band started out in the late 90's as a goth-metal band, and has evolved through the years with several line-up changes and different musical approaches, ending up with more of a melodious death-metal sound. When we wrote our debut album Shrouded Divine, we really felt strongly about the direction that the music was taking, and that we had found our style. Since the debut album we have taken our sound and our songwriting a few steps forward, pushing the elements from our debut further into various new directions.

I liked the debut album, but I notice progression on the new cd. I guess you agree with me?
Of course we think the new album is a big progression from the first one, but we kind of feel that we have taken the core of the first album, and its best aspects with us onto this new album.
The new album has more of everything, there's heavy chunk, proggy passages and soft clean parts, and overall it has better structured songs which works better together as a whole piece. All the material on "Monolith" is written at the same period of time, for the same album. This was not the case for the "Shrouded divine" album, which contained a bunch of previously written songs as well as some songs written just before the recording. Thereby this new album feels much more focused than the debut.
As the current line-up has played together for some time now, we are working better as a band now, and overall we feel stronger now as a band now than earlier.

How do you look back at your debut cd?
We are quite satisfied when we look back at the debut. Of course there things that we probably would have done different now, but at the same time we wouldn't want it to be any different than it is. We made our best at the time, and we're proud of the result as a part of our history. Same thing goes for the production on the albums, the first album felt really good when we recorded it, but at the time when we were ready to enter the studio for Monolith we had quite a lot of things we wanted to improve. Probably we will continue the same way with our next record too, both with the music and the production.

This is a dark album. Does it come straight from your soul? Do you have such a dark mind?
The music is quite dark yes, but we're not evil guys in any way, we're quite happy boys. So no, we probably don't have dark minds, the darkness and the melancholic melodies are something we all see as a beautiful part of our music, and not necessarily something negative or depressive. You don't have to be dark-souled or a troubled mind to create melancholic music, probably the opposite is more likely. Most of the people we've met that plays these kinds of music are kind and happy people, probably happier than many others.

How did it all start for the band? What is you musical background and experience?
As we mentioned a bit earlier, it started out as early as in the late 90's. Back then we played goth-metal with all the crap that came with that. We released some demos, and evolved a bit with each release, we became bored with the goth-metal, and wanted to challenge ourselves more musically. Also, we wanted to play more of the music that we listened to, at the start we kind of had to play what our musical skills allowed us to play. We're all self-taught musicians and the early demos were kind of a way for us to learn to handle our instruments.

This kind of metal is best performed by Swedish bands, I have the impression. Any idea how come?
It's kind of a strange thing, this kind of melodic death metal is almost like Nordic phenomena, as it's almost only bands from around here that plays this kind of music. If you look around, at bands from other places they have some kind of different approach, or vibe to the music. When you think about it, maybe it can be rooted in the Nordic folk-music, as the folk-music from Sweden has a lot of melancholy and mystique, often inspired by mythology and dark woods. This has probably in many ways inspired the Nordic metal-music as well. Other than that, today there are quite a lot of successful bands from around here, which inspires younger bands into the same directions.

How about the label? Are you pleased with them?
We don't really know that yet, do we? Hehe.. No, but our co-operation so far has been working out very good. They are nice people, and seem to really care about the bands they work with, so we're eager to see what will happen with this release. And yes, they seem to sign quite a lot of bands. We don't know very much about how they work with other bands, just that they have been very helpful and easy to work with for us. As long as they can handle the amount of bands they sign, it's of course a really good thing that they give many bands a helping hand.

How about the future? Touring during the summer? Perhaps a visit to Belgium?
The future, we don't know too much at the moment, we are working our very best to get out playing more live shows. However, nothing is confirmed enough to reveal yet. We hope to be able to reveal some news about that as we get closer to the release of our album. We really want to be able to get out on some kind of tour with this new album, as we didn't really get any opportunities for touring with our debut album.Of course we would love coming to Belgium, for some shows, although nothing such is planned at this very moment. Aside from gigs, we will begin working on new material, for a third album as soon as we have rehearsed our new live-set enough.

I am curious for the third album. If the quality goes the same way, this should be a perfect album. Do you already have an idea about the concept of the next album?
We are eager to begin creating our next album, and we have already got some ideas for a concept to the album. We haven't started rehearsing any new music yet, but there are a few ideas, and some riffs lying around that we will begin working with soon enough.
It's a bit too soon to reveal just about anything about the direction of the music and concept, because we don't know yet we're we are going to end up with it in the end.

Anything left to add?
Well, you have obviously heard our album already, but for those out there who haven't we are going to put up some nice previews of the album on our website and myspace-page, probably on pulverised's web and myspace as well, starting off with a neat chance to preview the entire album. So keep your eyes open for that.

http://www.myspace.com/in_mourning

Bart C.