ENTOMBED Interview

From the band's early days as Nihilist right up to their impending US tour with Crowbar, Pro-Pain and The Mighty Nimbes, Entombed have remained a powerhouse in death metal, refusing to follow the status quo of the genre and constantly redefining the meaning of the word heavy. Erin Fox caught up with Alex Hellid to get the latest on the group's several current projects.


The Gauntlet: The band has been very busy as of late, what has been happening?

Alex Hellid: Ah, we just got home from the Baltics, so it was, like, three shows there and just getting ready for the US tour. Other than that, just trying to get all of the bits and pieces together for the tour, you know, merchandise and all those things. A lot of things to do.

TG: So I take it that you're planning on having some pretty cool merch for this US tour?

AH: If we can everything ready in time, we'll have a few things. But it looks like we'll have a few things to sell, it'll be cool.

TG: It's been a little while since you've been around, what songs can fans expect to hear? Will the set be based on the material from Inferno?

AH: Lately we've done a mix of things, we haven't been in the States, we did a show in Florida at the end of 2003 with King Diamond, but before that we haven't really toured the States since like '98. It's gonna be a bit of everything but definitely we'll play stuff off the new album as well.

TG: How is it that Entombed, a band with creating an explosion in the early death metal community that would influence so many of these types of bands thereafter find themselves in the position of performing at a ballet?

AH: Yeah, that's what we're still asking ourselves. I mean, the people that came up with it to do this, these two choreographers, performing artists. You know, they come up with these crazy ideas. Instead of just letting it be a crazy idea, they actually go out and do them, so they like contacted us like, through the website and they finally convinced us to at least meet with them. Because at first, we just deleted their mail, we thought it was something of a joke and stuff. After three mails or something we were like "OK, let's see what they're up to, they obviously-either it's a really stupid joke or they actually want to do something like this" 'Cause they were like, 'We really like your band, how would you like to create the music for a ballet?" and it was at the opera house and we were like "That's too weird". But at the same time it was not one of those things that we could say no to, even though we didn't have a clue what it was gonna be like. Because, even though they tried to explain what it was that they wanted to do there was no way for us to actually know what it was gonna end up being. We took a chance, and I'm really glad we did, you know we've been doing this a long time, so it was a great time to go on and do something just completely different from what we had been doing the last ten years, just doing albums and doing a tour and we go back and repeat that. So it was just a nice break from that.

TG: Obviously you had some apprehension going in to this, what was the experience like for you? How did it feel to be a part of such a unique event?

AH: Yeah, it was great because it was like one of those things were it was fun, like, all the way through, you know? Just being in that house it's like it's like its own world, it is this big house and there's like seven hundred people that work in there and it's got its own bars and restaurants. So we got to see a bit of their world inside that house and be a part of it, being a part of it was a great experience. It was great for us as a band as well, cause we, usually when we rehearse it's not something where we play things over and over again, trying to make things the exact right tempos, and, I kind of think it made us a little more disciplined. It was just important that we played the songs and kept the tempos right, you know? Usually in a live show, the tempos can vary quite a bit, you know, depending on what kind of show it turns out to be. Here it was kinda important to keep tempos right. We needed to be able to know how to sync it up with what they would do as well.

TG: It seems as if doing the songs in this format has really brought out the emotion in the older songs. You can hear a lot more of the dynamics when the material is presented in this way.

AL: It's a lot more dynamic than the average Entombed show, you just get more of the ups and downs and I think they, originally the idea was to create music, to just totally make some new music for it but that was kind of weird, because we started on some new stuff, but then the stuff that we brought them, they thought it was too soft, because we were trying to make something that we thought they wanted. Like, maybe they can dance to this. But we wanted to concentrate on sounding like us, and that's what they wanted, they want it to be Entombed. So we said OK, let us know what parts you like and we'll just re-arrange or take whatever you want instead of trying to make something like what you want, you know? We're just really, really happy to have been a part of it, and it was actually something that you could enjoy watching as well, you know people went to see it more than once, which was cool.

TG: How did you go about picking the songs then? Did you give them a group of songs to consider or did they just pick things from your catalog that they thought would fit?

AH: They were fans of the band and so they had all the albums. We had just recorded Morningstar when we started working with them, so we gave them some rough mixes of that as well. So, they could pretty much pick whatever they wanted out of what we had made up to that point. And we just let them choose what they wanted to do and they might have had some "OK, let's do this song instead of that one instead". We were thinking something like it will be this song or that song and like, told them which one we wanted to play. It was pretty much like they knew the songs before we started, the kind of things that would fit with the images that they had in mind. All the time we were doing this, we were standing in the middle of everything, so we weren't watching what was happening on stage all the time. The first time that we will see totally what happened would be the DVD that we're working on right now. Hopefully we'll have it finished in a few months, we'll put it out as soon as we can.

TG: So you have had so much going on with the "Inferno" release and this "Unreal Estate" project that you have had in the works since 2002, but you have another important release that is set to go as well, the Nihilist demo release on CD.

AH: Yes, I mean a lot of people, a lot of labels have been asking us "Can we do this, can we do that?" with these old demos and now that we have our own label ourselves, we thought we just might dig everything out ourselves and see how good we can make it sound with the things that we have and just put everything out. And it's, it was fifteen years since the first album came out. So you could say it's a good time to start putting things like this out.

TG: Was there any remixing involved?

AH: We will re-master it, but we wont remix anything, let it be what it is, it's more to give the fans that want it the opportunity to get it, and to hear it the way it sounded when we put it out the first time. We'll put some older stuff on it as well, maybe stuff that we recorded around that time that we never put out. Let's see what we can find for bonus songs other than the demo songs.

TG: Although you haven't been to the states in a while, Entombed has certainly kept busy touring in other parts of the world, are you noticing a lot of "Left Hand Path" era fans at shows or do you find it's a lot of kids just being exposed to the new material?

AH: We get a bit of both, actually. It's definitely the crowd that has been there for fifteen years, you know? And then there are always people that hear us for the first time that maybe came with a friend, so that's really cool. This weekend, we had just played for a bunch of people that had never seen us before but had been fans for a long time, you know, because we had never been to the Baltic States before. And even there, there were a few people there that had just heard us for the first time as well so it's great. We've kind of been around for so long that we can go pretty much anywhere in the world and draw a nice crowd, you know, we're not like huge, huge. But we can go to South Africa and Australia and Japan. We haven't done that much in South America. But, I think that's one of the things I'm really happy about, when we go to places that we've never been before and there's always a crowd showing up.

TG: Where have you found that fans are the craziest?

AH: It seems the warmer it gets, the crazier they get for some reason, Southern Europe, further South in America too, it seems the further you get, they get crazier and crazier. I don't know why that is. I wouldn't say it is much of a difference once you get into it and performing. If it's a good show and they move around or just when you get that energy going in the room, I think that's the great thing about music. It's a language that everybody understands and it doesn't matter if it's like, different countries or whatever and that's really cool. All of the borders are not there, the countries just become one.

TG: Looking back on the band's earlier days is there any one thing that you would change?

AH: We would have just, made that contract one album shorter, then it would have been perfect. To make it three albums instead of four, to fucking change things. Then it would be great, cause, just the way things happened, we didn't really want to release that fourth album on Earache and that ended up costing us a year of trying to get out of that deal and that's never good for a band, to have, like, nothing happen for a year, you know? It's not good for the soul.

TG: Looking forward, where is Entombed's focus musically?

AH: In one sense, we never changed from what we were doing, form where we started as a band, cause we're always changing and looking for new stuff, so we're still doing that and that's the most important thing, I think, for us. Not to forget to change, not to do exactly the same thing as we did on the previous album. So that is the main thing that I want us to keep from album to album, just that thing of not trying to play it safe. But, not just change for the sake of change either, but that whole thing of just trying to move forward, you know. That's kind of what makes Entombed what it is, but still keep the guitar sound that we have. Make it so people can recognize that guitar sound and that it's an Entombed song, you know? I'm not really sure what the new album is gonna be like . We've thrown ideas around, but we haven't gotten down to the actual recording. Pretty soon, once we get home from the States, that's when we'll focus on recording and that's when we're gonna know what it will be like. That's what makes it interesting too. Not even we know what it's gonna be like until it's done, you know?


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Tags:  Entombed  , Alex Hellid, interviews

Erin Fox    February 10, 2005