Samael

The Gauntlet: Where are you right now?

Vorph: I am in Switzerland right now, we leave for our US tour with Carcass next week.


The Gauntlet: The new album is much more raw than the last 3. Was the entire band on the same page with this change?

Vorph: The whole band was behind it as it was going to be a side-project. We had like three songs and wanted to do some 100% fast metal and see where it would go from there. Soon after that, we had enough material for a full album. We thought it would be too radical of a change that wouldn’t fit the moment where Samael was. We decided to call the project ‘Above’ and we had this whole concept behind it. When we were about to send it off for mastering, after we came back from our Fall American tour, there was some stuff we really craved to play live. The songs would be a nice addition to our setlist. The songs might not have been as thoughtful and in-depth as our last 3 albums, but they are more instinctive and rough. It will be a surprise to a lot of people as I don’t think people were expecting for this. We surprised ourselves to do something like this at this point. We called Nuclear Blast and told them about the album, they listened and were excited about it.


The Gauntlet: Was the side-project all the members of Samael or just you and your brother?

Vorph: It is all the members and we are all a part of it in some way. Xy does all the music by himself and I do the riffs and vocals. Then we all get together and work on the song. The composition of the songs is all Xy.


The Gauntlet: A lot of bands start side projects to get away from the musical constraints they put on themselves within the band. Samael has evolved so much since its’ beginnings 22 years ago. Obviously you can’t put out a country album and call it Samael, but what was it about Above that made you think it couldn’t be Samael?

Vorph: That is the thing. It comes down to if we feel like it, we will do it. We like to experiment a lot and the music needs to feel something to us. We have done a lot of industrial stuff, black metal stuff and electronic stuff. We were at a point in Samael were we didn’t know what to do next. We had this project that was fun to do and just wanted to do that. I think somehow that having an album released at this point will have some influence on the next album. We have been thinking of having more guitars on the next album. There is some kind of energy there now that is spontaneous. We lost a lot of that on the last three albums as they took so long to make. It is nice renewing that energy though on Above. It is nice to go through a song and when it is done it’s done.


The Gauntlet: Do you feel you over produced the last three albums?

Vorph: With some of the songs, we never could see the end. We were so much into it and we recorded it out here. It was done at a friend’s studio so was cheap to do. Since it was so cheap, we could afford to keep going back to rerecord parts of the songs. I had a feeling that it was never going to end. It was a relief when it finally did. With Above, the creativity was instinctive.