SOURCE – Metal Gods is the band’s seventh full-length release. Are we to expect many more albums in the future from Dream Evil? Are you satisfied with what you have so far achieved as a band?
Peter Stålfors (Bass) – Hey! We’re not dead yet… Ha ha. So you could expect more albums in the future and I’m very satisfied with what we have made so far. We never set out to become a huge band touring the world every year, we want to keep it “lagom” as we say in Sweden… not to small and not to big.
SOURCE – You released your last album Six in 2017 and now you are back with your new album, Metal Gods. What caused this hiatus between albums?
Peter Stålfors (Bass) – First, we’re kind of lazy… and we have other jobs beside Dream Evil so writing songs is not the primary work we do, even if it’s the most fun… And then we got a new drummer in 2019 which halted the writing a bit. We wrote some songs during the pandemic, and we had a lot of material ready in 2022. We could of course rushed things a bit then but we perfected the songs and then recorded the album in October 2023 and after that it wasn’t us who delayed the release.
SOURCE – How would you describe the new album, comparing it to the previous ones? Would you say that it is different from the previous one or did you follow the same tactics? What did the last album teach you that became helpful when putting this record together?
Peter Stålfors (Bass) – Talking to other persons they compare the new album to be more like the first album, DragonSlayer, which by looking at Spotify statistics is the most successful album to date. And that makes me happy. I personally think this album is a killer. In retrospect, the last album (SIX) didn’t turn out to be so strong. There are some highlights in there but overall we needed to write a much stronger album than SIX and I’m proud to say that we have.
SOURCE – You’ve released a music video for Metal Gods. How have you found the fan reception for the first glimpse into the new record?
Peter Stålfors (Bass) – It’s playing well on Youtube and Spotify and the comments for the video on Youtube and in our social media has been very positive. We performed it live as Sweden Rock Festival on June 5th and it looked like the crowd loved it.
SOURCE – On this record, you also got Jonathan Thorpenberg (THE UNGUIDED), Tommy Johansson (ex-SABATON) and Chris Amott (ex-ARCH ENEMY/DARK TRANQUILLITY) on this record. How did that come about?
Peter Stålfors (Bass) – Jonathan and his co-writing colleague Rober Kukla co-wrote two songs on the new album with us. So using Jonathan, who is a great guitarist, as a guest soloist felt like a natural thing to do. Fredrik thought it was a fun thing to get some more guest solos on the album and he knows people from his other occupation (producer in Studio Fredman), so that’s that…
SOURCE – This album comes after a line-up change, with Sören Fardvik taking over for Pat Power. How did that change the creative process?
Peter Stålfors (Bass) – Sören (Sir N) is not just a drummer, he’s actually a pretty good guitarist as well. Pat wrote a lot of songs on SIX. On Metal Gods Sören co-wrote two songs with the rest of us (Fight In The Night and Night Stalker).
SOURCE – Do you think the tendency of consumers to download single songs more than albums will mean that the idea of a concept album will fade?
Peter Stålfors (Bass) – Hard to say, I haven’t analyzed this. Some songs grow on you the more you listen to them and by downloading some songs you will miss that. So I hope that the listeners find the time to listen to the whole album.
SOURCE – Finally, is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Peter Stålfors (Bass) – We have a quadroligy now with the new song “Chose Force” as we earlier have released Chosen Ones, Chosen Twice, The Unchosen One and now Chosen Force… It will probably build up from a quadroligy so something else in the future. And as always the conclusion – Heavy Metal In The Night.
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