Band Interview: Heathen
Games, Brrraaains & A Head-Banging Life had the chance to chat to Kragen (guitars) of thrash heavyweights Heathen. Their brand new album, Empire of the Blind is out September 18th 2020. What follows is a transcript of some of the talking points. You can watch/listen to the entire interview via YouTube, Soundcloud, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Hi Kragen. Thank you so much for your time. How are you doing today?
I’m good, thank you. Thanks for the interview. Looking forward to finally getting the new Heathen album out!
How have you been coping throughout 2020 as a whole? Now that we’re living in the COVID times.
Well, I’m a homebody, so being home hasn’t been a problem for me. You know, obviously it cost us. It caused us to cancel our tour dates for this year. The album was delayed by about three months because of COVID. Ultimately it was more related to retailers focusing on, you know, taking things that people needed at the time when the pandemic first happened, you know, masks, gloves, stuff like that.
They weren’t taking new music. So we had to had to delay it until they were ready to take new music. So other than that, you know, everybody in the band is just kind of doing whatever they can to stay sane and stay safe. We’re just all focused on promoting the new record.
At the time of recording we’re less than two weeks away from the release of Empire of the Blind. A very long time. It must feel good.
Absolutely, it feels great. We signed with Nuclear Blast in 2012, and actually started writing music for the album that year and probably had half that record written by 2014. So, you know, we had a delay of about five years where we really couldn’t focus on writing and recording because both Lee and I were playing with Exodus.
We had a huge, heavy tour schedule with them.
Every time I had a break, I would come back and recover and then write some stuff. But, you know, the way that we work, the way that we write, it really takes a lot of focus and we like to take our time with it. So we spent all of 2014 working on the record, either writing or preproduction or recording.
So we’re definitely happy to have it out. It came out great. We’re really proud of it and we can’t wait for the fans to get to hear the whole record.
So when work began then, or I guess when you really focused your mind on it in 2019, what was the goal, so to speak, in regards to how you wanted it to sound?
We collectively decided that we wanted to have the next album be a combination of the song writing and sort of epic feel of the songs from Victims of Deception and The Evolution of Chaos, but mixed with the shorter arrangements, song arrangements from Breaking the Silence. So what we tried to do with the new record really was to keep the same writing style and feel of the songs, but have them be a little more concise.
Do you think you’ve achieved that?
Yeah, I mean, it seems to me that we were able to do that, we don’t put any rules or regulations on what we do at all. So if somebody had written a 12 minute epic, we wouldn’t have not included it or anything. We just you know, we just had a general idea of how we wanted to proceed.
We focused on the song writing and still trying to give the songs that epic feel and give them as much detail and depth as we could.
You sound pretty confident about the release, that fans are going to embrace it and what Heathen sound like in 2020.
We’re confident with the record, that’s for sure, as far as how fans receive it, who knows? That’s one of those things we can’t control. I think there are two categories of the thrash metal fans. There are the fans that are very picky, in particular with what they like in their thrash metal, and then there are other ones that just want to support the genre OVERALL.
It seems to me that the younger fans have put a whole bunch of rules and regulations on what thrash metal should be. In terms of what tuning you’re in and what speed the songs are and all that sort of stuff. You know, Heathen has never followed the rules and we kind of just write whatever sounds good to us. And that’s honestly, that’s what thrash metal always was when it started out. It was about breaking the rules.
You know, we have a ballad on the record. We have an instrumental on the record. We have fast stuff. We have slow stuff. You name it. There’s a lot of variety.
Do you think Heathen is well equipped when it comes to the modern dealings of being in a band and promoting the record? The social media style of things and constant stream of content and so on?
It’s certainly different from what the band has done in the past. Yeah, I would say that, you know, this band is traditionally old school mentality wise with our approach to writing and everything else.
It’s certainly different for us where we’re using social media and we’re doing you know, we’re doing everything that we can to sort of promote. At the same time, there are a lot of things that bands that are doing, like playing more online concerts and stuff like that. To me personally, it’s like watching a band rehearse.
Live concerts are about the interaction between the band and the fans, that’s what makes it special. So to me, watching a virtual concert, especially paying to see something, if a bunch of guys want to get together and do a jam, I think that’s cool, but paying to watch a band rehearse basically, I don’t know.
Aside from the release of the album, are you predominantly focused on plans for 2021, seeing as getting out live this year is near impossible?
Yeah, we’re doing what we can to reschedule the tour dates that we had from this year for next year but it’s difficult. We don’t know what is going to be acceptable or not acceptable in terms of traveling. We don’t know if a vaccine is going to be required or how it’s going to be crossing borders in Europe or, you know, flying internationally. We really just don’t know if there are things in place like a two week quarantine or something like that, which could kill a band financially.
We’ll just have to take it as it comes.
