(Our French contributor Zoltar conducted the following excellent interview with Puteraeon founder and vocalist/guitarist Jonas Lindblood in advance of Emanzipation Production‘s release of this Swedish band’s newest album on May 30th — an album we will premiere-stream one hour from now.)
“Dead but dreaming.” Howard Philipps Lovecraft probably never thought while writing for the first time about what would become his most famous creation in the aptly titled The Call Of Cthulhu nearly a century ago back in 1926 that, somehow, this conception would also ring true about his never-ending influence on extreme metal.
A lot has been said about how pioneers like Black Sabbath (‘Beyond The Wall Of Sleep’) or Metallica (‘The Call Of Ktulu’) early on associated the name of the master of Providence to distorted riffing on selected tracks, but lately more than a few bands like French weirdos The Great Old Ones or German epic travelers Sulphur Aeon have gone the extra mile by entirely dedicating their lore to his writings and monstrous cosmology.
The cool thing about Puteraeon is that they never jumped on the bandwagon to start with yet made it clear from their third demo what the deal was, going as far as doing a whole set of songs (The Extraordinary Work Of Herbert West) solely dedicated to one of Lovecraft’s most-beloved novels – and the source of inspiration for what remains his best movie-adaptation, Stuart Gordon-directed 1985 cult horror flick Re-Animator.
On the other hand, talking of an actual “band” was at first a bit of stretch, as Puteraeon was initially just Jonas Lindblood “fucking around with his guitar, a newly installed home studio and few ideas” after his longstanding thrash/death ship Taetre had sunk without a trace and no warning after three pretty cool albums. But having found his way with Herbert West, Lindblood recruited a whole line-up (included former early ’00s B-series Swedish black warriors Immemoreal‘s drummer) and set out to put out in between 2011 and 2020 a series of crispy SweDeath albums and an EP solely dedicated to Mister Lovecraft’s gallery of monsters.
After going silent for a couple of years, they came back with a bang with a digital-only EP before striking with their boldest album yet, an ambitious adaptation of At The Mountains Of Madness, one of Lovecraft’s most epic works, and probably not the easiest one to write a whole concept album about, although Jonas doesn’t sound very phased out about achieving what very few extreme metal bands out there could have achieved.
When did you first read At The Mountains Of Madness? What impression did it make on you and what place do you think it holds within the whole Cthulhu mythos?
I actually didn’t read it until like a couple of years back. I had a pretty good knowledge around the story though. I had been using it previously as inspiration for songs like ‘Shoggoth’ and ‘In Dreamdead Sleep’ on earlier albums. I think it’s a great story. I have a lot of favorites so this is up there with The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Call Of Cthulhu and The Thing On The Doorstep.
Although this is Lovecraft’s magnum opus, it ain’t exactly the easiest to adapt, especially to put into music as it isn’t very action-packed. Instead, it has a lot of descriptions and reminiscences where, as it was the tradition with Lovecraft, things are more suggested than actually shown. Why did you nevertheless decide to go for it?
I agree with you and that is also what I love. Like old horror movies, suggesting more than is shown. I thought a lot after our last album, 2020’s The Cthulhian Pulse, what story to do next time. And At The Mountains Of Madness has a special kind of feel to it. The cold, the remote location, the snow, the catacombs, and something alien, evil lurking. Fantastic.
Since there are more and more bands these days taking inspiration from the master of Providence, did you feel you ought to make a difference by daring to adapt the one title no-one else dared to tackle?
Nah, we’ve been doing this thing for some time now. I didn’t really think long on who had adapted this story. I just felt the story had such a great vibe, it would fit perfectly on our next album.
How faithful did you remain towards the text? Did you add characters or scenes? Or did you have to do the exact opposite, cut some to make sure it would fit into one single album?
Well of course, this is an adaption. It’s a music album and not the book. So it’s obviously not the same, but we didn’t really change a lot, maybe cut some small bits and pieces really. In my opinion it’s quite true to the story.
Is the story told from one specific point of view or from various characters?
The story is written from different perspectives. But mainly from the main character and professor William Dyer’s perspective.
Which part of the novel proved the hardest to put into music?
Hmm, I would say the aftermath. We chose to end at the escape really (so it’s a bit earlier than in the actual book), so the fate of Dyer’s companion Danforth is instead glimpsed in the videos we did. I think Lovecraft often circles back, so to say. The start and the end of the story are happening at the same place.
At The Mountains Of Madness takes place in the south pole. When you play death metal with heavily distorted guitars and blastbeats, how does one evoke in musical terms those cold and vast wastelands?
Music is a universal language. When the first riffs were created we didn’t know what story they would tell. I kept building songs (without vocals at this point) and I guess I must have had like three/four more or less done when I knew which story we would do. So then I kind of cut up the story into chapters and started thinking about which song should be which chapter.
The novel ends more or less with a question mark, strongly suggesting some evil forces were still lurking in the depths and about to return to the surface, although the protagonists choose to flee before witnessing it. What is your conclusion on the Mountains Of Madness album?
Well that is more or less how I see it too. Remember that Danforth saw something that William didn’t see while they fled, causing him to go insane.
Did you see online the very few visual tests Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro did of his aborted filmed adaptation of At The Mountains Of Madness? Do you think it is actually doable to faithfully transcribe on screen Lovecraft’s cosmic vision? After all, there’s been very few Lovecraft movies since Re-Animator and maybe for a good reason…
Yeah I did. I would have loved seeing his movie. But Lovecraft is hard to adapt since so much of the feeling is built upon the unknown, the unseen. The paranoid feeling of something nameless malevolent.
Have you paid attention to some of the most Lovecraft-affiliated extreme metal albums? I was thinking for instead about The Great Old Ones from Bordeaux, France, who recently did a whole album about the imaginary city Kadath…
Not sure if I have listened to all but I have listened to The Great Old Ones. I remember listening through their latest album. It was cool, spooky and a lot of atmospheres.
In 2024, you put out the digital EP Quindecennial Horror where you rerecorded some old material originally recorded in between 2008 and 2011. Why was it important to revisit the past like this? Did you feel the need to somehow return to the very beginning to reconnect yourself with Puteraeon’s DNA before embarking on your most ambitious album yet maybe?
It was mainly for two reasons. We wanted to release something celebrating our 15th year as a band. Now as it turned out it was released on our 16th year haha, we weren’t fast enough. So, as a fun thing to do we thought we would re-record some of the old songs we usually or often play live. To give the songs a new life so to say. I was in the process of writing that new album and I knew this would take more time, so that was the 2nd reason. We also wanted something out for the fans as we knew that, ultimately, the gap in between the new album and the previous one would be quite long – five years.
Before I let you go, if I’m not mistaken, at some point last year you seemed to have decided to finally complete the ‘lost’ album from the early ’00s that Taetre were supposedly working on when the band split. Is there really something happening there?
Yes and no. The lost album from 2005 is still, well, lost. I did spend some time during 2021-2023 rerecording old Taetre songs, mainly from the period of 1993-1996, songs that never ended up on an album. I also wrote I think two completely new songs and rerecorded a song or two from the 2005 album. But I still haven’t mixed anything. And I still don’t know what to do with it really. I think there is material for like one full-length and a short EP or something. Maybe I’ll just mix it myself and release it online, I don’t know.
https://puteraeon.bandcamp.com/album/mountains-of-madness
https://www.facebook.com/PUTERAEON/