(On March 13th FDA Records released Eulogy to Blasphemy, the fourth album by the Swedish death metal band Gluttony, and that motivated Zoltar to arrange the following interview with founding member and guitarist Anders Härén.)
Considering the rather ‘modern’ (for lack of better terms, as this had probably more to do with the average age of the musicians involved than anything else) take on death metal that MY OWN GRAVE had, it was too tempting to some to call them out as posers once the word got out that three quarters of its line-up all of a sudden decided to play it old-school with a full-on HM-2-fueled mindset as GLUTTONY. But if jumping on the SweDeath wagon is one thing, the band’s first proper album Beyond The Veil Of Flesh released back in 2014 was not.
Maybe it had something to do with having a singer (Magnus Ödling) with a more black metal background (the man did front SETHERIAL for fifteen years plus) or the unusually tight rhythmic approach à la VOMITORY, but a cheap DISMEMBER/ENTOMBED throw-off it was not. Twelve years later, the band are releasing their fourth and probably best record to date, Eulogy To Blasphemy, and it was all too tempting to ask their founding member and guitar player Anders Härén why his thirst for the HM-2 hasn’t dried out yet…
I’d like to go back to the very start for a minute… When you decided to put together what would turn out to be GLUTTONY, did you have back then a firm vision of what you wanted to achieve? I mean, was it an idea of ‘let’s tap into that whole HM-2 thing and see what we can get’ or was it more a case of just playing and find what would come out?
Back then I was playing with MY OWN GRAVE which I enjoyed but it seemed each song was becoming more complicated than the last. I needed an outlet to just write groovy, old-school songs, so I bought an HM-2 pedal on Ebay. I cranked it to max, tuned the guitar down to A and then I stroke an E chord, and after that the riffs just wrote themselves. There was never a plan to jump on any retro-HM2-bandwagon, just the desire to play the kind of music I grew up with.
If I’m not mistaken, the whole thing started with just you wasn’t it?
Yeah, in the very beginning it was only me. I wrote a couple of songs and made the logo. The songs were the ones that would wind up on the Coffinborn demo in modified versions, plus the song ‘Mater Suspirium’ that I scrapped.
It seems that MY OWN GRAVE did bite the dust around the time GLUTTONY was born… I assume this ain’t no coincidence is it?
MY OWN GRAVE were ten fantastic years and I am still extremely proud of our final album, Necrology. We were really active, playing any show we could get and touring for the last years. Then we hit two walls at the same time: kids/family/job/house and total lack of inspiration. In retrospect, no it’s not a coincidence that GLUTTONY emerged from the ashes of MY OWN GRAVE as three of us still wanted to continue but in a new (or old?) direction.
Indeed, three out of four members of GLUTTONY were in MY OWN GARVE, isn’t it? As if you wanted to carry on with MY OWN GRAVE but under another moniker and with a different musical direction…
I’ve never liked to play solo. The songs become much better when Max, me, and John arrange them together. One such example is ‘The Revenant’, the opening track of our debut album: I never intended the riff to be over a d-beat. That was John’s idea and it really made the song so much better. When we started MY OWN GRAVE in 2001 it was a few years before all the 3-word-bands from America started popping up. Unfortunately, we were bunched together with them just from the band name. From the first song I wrote I knew GLUTTONY would be something else. More primitive, less fiddling, and more bonesaw. To continue as MY OWN GRAVE was never an option.
Getting Johan Jansson from ETERNAL DARKNESS, DEMONICAL, UNCURBED and a thousand others to do the vocals on the demo… Was it out of necessity or did you really want him in the band?
We became great friends with Johan when we toured with DEMONICAL and DEATHBOUND. I could tell he had the same inspiration for death metal as us and I thought his singing was old-school and amazing. When the songs for Coffinborn were recorded I asked him if he wanted to join the band as a vocalist and he said yes. The demo was recorded in a drunken, hazy weekend in Sundsvall where we accidentally recorded vocals for the song ‘Beyond the Veil of Flesh’ as well. We had written it but I wanted to leave it out of the demo since I had already envisioned that it would be the title track for an album (if we ever got to make one).
I seem to remember that initially GLUTTONY was deemed a studio-only band. Was it the case?
I would say there was no plan at all really. We did one show with Johan at Club Deströyer in Sundsvall as support for NAGLFAR in 2014. We only had the demo songs and ‘Beyond the Veil of Flesh‘ so we added a cover of DISMEMBER’s ‘Bleed For Me’ to the set to have enough songs. I remember I mixed in a piece of the ‘Dreaming In Red’ solo just for fun. Johan lived 5-6 hours from Sundsvall, and like I said: kids/family/job/house, none of us really had any time to play live.
There’s something almost grotesque about the name GLUTTONY. Is it intentional?
Yes, of corpse. I remember watching the movie Se7en when it came out and thinking to myself that GLUTTONY was the coolest deadly sin and a bad-ass word. When I started writing the lyrics for the Coffinborn demo I had all these classic movies in my head: The Beyond, Dawn of the Dead, Zombie Holocaust. You know all those R-rated VHS tapes that you had a friend who had managed to get uncut? With that being the theme, then GLUTTONY was a fitting band name. Is there any creature more gluttonous than a zombie?
The whole living-dead make-up thing… Was it ‘just’ an extra or something that was part of the overall concept?
I think it has several explanations. When Johan was the singer, we didn’t wear corpse paint with GLUTTONY but me, John, and Max wore corpse paint in our MISFITS tribute band called GODLESS GLENN & THE ASTRO ZOMBIES, so it wasn’t foreign to us. I’ve been a black metal fan since MAYHEM’s Deathcrush and I’ve had some short-lived BM projects. When we recruited Magnus I remember he suggested that we should wear corpse paint, him coming from many years of black metal and most recently from SETHERIAL. I remember thinking “wait a minute, could you play old-school Death Metal and wear corpse paint?” but then I remembered early GROTESQUE. Since then it’s part of who we are. GLUTTONY is leather jackets and corpse paint, no matter the circumstances, even if it’s 40 degrees on a Czech summer festival…
You aren’t the most prolific band in the world, with roughly one album every four years. Why?
I have no idea, it’s not intentional. With life, work, and everything, it takes us roughly a year to write a new album and then about 6 months to record and have it mixed and mastered. Then as you know it’ll take another six months or so to get it released and then we typically want to tour for at least two years and play the new material live until the inspiration comes to write something new again. I’d rather release one great album every four years than crank out albums, singles, and EPs out of my ass like some bands do.
From my point of view, your third album from 2022 Drogulus seemingly flew under the radar. Was it because you did play concerts as much as you wanted for this one in order to promote it properly? Or was it something else?
Once again, I have to confess that we had no plan. In 2020 we were ready to go on a mini tour with MOB-47 when the pandemic hit. With nothing else to do, we started writing new material instead. Beyond the Veil of Flesh was a success but its follow-up Cult of the Unborn didn’t sell as much so we were dropped from Vic Records. So we figured that we would just release Drogulus ourselves. So we raised some 3000 Euros from our fans on Kickstarter for a vinyl release. Then, Bestial Invasion Records reached out and wanted to release it on CD. With the MOB-47 tour out the window and getting restless during the pandemic, we talked it over and decided that it would be fun to tour again, even though we hadn’t done it since the SETHERIAL and MY OWN GRAVE days, more than ten years ago.
By then it was 2023 and GLUTTONY had existed for twelve years without ever playing outside the North of Sweden, so there was a strong demand for us to play in the rest of Europe. I think we did sixteen shows on that Drogulus tour and when we came home, everyone agreed that it was too much fun so we ended up doing another European tour as headliner in 2024.
When did you start working on the new album? To my ears, there’s a slightly different musical direction, with a tighter, not as-slimy sound…
The tour in 2024 finished in September and I think we wrote the first new song in October that year, ‘Immured By Rotting Corpses’. Then we followed the same recipe as we had for Cult and Drogulus: I write some riffs at home, we meet up in the rehearsal space and write a song together, and record it. Rinse, repeat, until it feels like we’re done. Then we sit down and listen to the songs, drink beer or coffee, argue, and take notes. Then there will be a second round of adjustments (it’s very rare that a song survives unscathed from first recording to album) and after that we book studio time.
About the musical direction I honestly couldn’t tell you. When I listen to our four albums, I can hear the difference and see the paths we took, but it’s never been intentional. With the exception of the vocals on Drogulus, that was a group decision to have them more towards Black Metal since it fit better with the atmosphere of the songs. I’m happy that you like the sound, so do I! We had a lot of fun experimenting with the guitar sound which can also be seen in our studio diary posted on youtube.
More than ever, most of Eulogy To Blasphemy’s lyrics are about corpses or being on your way to become one, so to speak. Why? Maybe because it’s the most death metal topic EVER?
Hehe well to be fair we’ve explored other topics. Cult of the Unborn is a horror tale told through twelve tracks (I think you can guess who inspired that) and the songs on Drogulus are all about the bizarre realms created by H.P. Lovecraft. But yeah, on Eulogy we went back to form I guess. There’s one song about the movie Hellraiser, one about the French movie Martyrs, and then it’s zombies, cannibalism, mass graves, and unholy sermons.
Do you think that Magnus’ mostly black metal background – although I had the chance to see him play a very intimate gig in Copenhagen in 2002 or 2003 while fronting DIABOLICAL – gives his performance and vocal approach a different spin?
I’ve known Magnus for many years and seen and heard him in many bands and genres so I have always considered him to be the best singer I know. For three reasons: First of all he writes amazing lyrics. Second, he can truly use his singing as an instrument which adds the final dimension to GLUTTONY. Third, him and Max have a very special chemistry when it comes to arranging the vocals and sneaking in the mandatory dubs on words like death, Satan, and shadows. In the end I think the songs come out more varied than with many other singers.
A KING DIAMOND cover ain’t the most obvious choice when you’re a death metal band, especially in terms of vocals. Why did you pick that one anyway and why take a song off The Eye, maybe not the most obvious KING DIAMOND album either?
Well, it’s impossible to pick one song or one album with KING DIAMOND. It was actually Magnus who suggested ‘Burn’ and we figured that he would carry the heaviest load being the singer so we knew he hadn’t chosen lightly. He had listened to it and realized that he could do a good interpretation and that, with the d-beat, it could make a killer cover for GLUTTONY. So, I would say it was more the choice of that particular song than choosing a song from The Eye. And we like to pick unconventional covers. After all, we did a cover on ‘Paint It Black’ on Coffinborn…
The zombie on the cover… Is it your mascot so to speak? An updated version of the living dead we can see on almost all of your artworks?
Haha I’ve never thought of that. Technically, there’s no zombie on Drogulus, only a gigantic sea-monster with too many eyes and tentacles. It would be fun to have a zombie mascot but I’m gonna disappoint you and say no, it’s not. Jeffrey Zornow did the artwork for Beyond the Veil of Flesh which features a zombie taking a bite off an arm. For Cult of the Unborn it’s actually the Casket Master himself sitting on the throne and a tip of the cap to the Scream Bloody Gore cover. That one was made my Mark Richards (Heavy Hand Illustrations) and is such a masterpiece. I am really proud of all our album covers actually, Karmazid did an amazing job with Drogulus as well!
The album cover for Eulogy to Blasphemy was a true pain in the ass. We talked to Seagrave but he didn’t want to make it as obscene as we wanted. I really like the artwork for HEADS FOR THE DEAD and DYING FETUS’ Make Them Beg for Death, so for a while we were going in that direction as well. Then we spent hours dissecting old horror movie aesthetics until our friend Håkan Sjödin painted a cover based on those. I think it turned out excellent! See for yourself on Friday the 13th of March when the CD and LP drops worldwide on F.D.A. Records. And see you on tour in May!