TRANQUILITY

Louder Than Hell recently conducted an interview with guitarist Niklas Sundin of Swedish melodic death metallers DARK TRANQUILITY. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below. Louder Than Hell: You have mentioned before that you rarely feel excited for an album at the end of recording sessions because of the amount of time you spend on it, but that you feel good about "Construct" now that it is done. What about the end of the new album's sessions is different for you? Sundin: Well, that was something that I put on Twitter for some reason, and it got misunderstood quite a bit. What I tried to say was that a typical effect of being locked up in a studio for 2-3 months listening to every single second of the new songs over and over again is that you're getting extremely tired of the material. At the same time as you know that you've created something great, there's a part of you that never want to hear the songs again. Also, the collaborative and democratic nature ofDARK TRANQUILITY means that there always are riffs and ideas that a single member doesn't find too interesting according to his personal preferences, so what normally happens directly after a studio session is that I sit down and think that the result is OK, but if X and Y would have been done differently, it would have been even better (again: for my own tastes). In this case, there were two main parameters that were different: The members' opinions on the material were a bit more uniform — i.e. no great clashes in taste — and the actual mixing process brought out a lot of details and nuances in the songs that we previously weren't aware of. The result is that I for a change actually was a massive fan of"Construct" from the first time I heard the final mix. Well, as you can see, I'm not a guy that gets my opinion across very well in 140 characters, ha ha!