SOURCE – Your new album Cult of the Serpent Sun is coming out soon. Can you tell us a bit about the sound and feel of the new record?
Van Labrakis (Vocals, Guitar) – I’d say it sounds darker, meaner, and angrier than what came before it. Cult of the Serpent Sun is probably the most honest album we’ve done to date. It represents who we are and what we sound like as a unit better than anything we’ve done so far. We still love our previous albums, of course, and we, like our fans, will always have soft spots for Voices and Darkness Silence. But this is us, right now, in 2025.
The big change here is the amount of time we’ve spent on the road as a band. Touring has hardened us and also brought us to reality. We are back on this earth! We finally started feeling like we belong in the metal scene, at least in the US. We started embracing the idea that we are part of a much larger network, a large community of people working together for the same goal. We all love heavy metal.
The war in Ukraine was also pivotal for the lyrical themes of this album. It made us angrier than we were before, I think. We still view things through the prism of myth, but the topics we discuss are less about the inner world of the psyche and more about the outer world.
SOURCE – You released three singles before the album, Crow (Fear the Night), Cult of the Serpent Sun and The Mystic. How important do you think singles are in this era, compared to full-length releases?
Van Labrakis (Vocals, Guitar) – We love the album format. We all grew up holding vinyl albums and listening to them from front to back. It’s a very different experience than consuming music on MTV back in the ’80s or just listening to the radio. The world is moving away from that. Or, more accurately, the people who run the streaming services are moving away from that. Alas, the algorithm. Consume! Obey! And so on…
I don’t think you need a smelly, hairy metal dude to tell you what’s wrong with a machine that is trying to grab your attention so you keep doom scrolling. We signed up to play heavy metal music to try and elevate people, not help in further enslaving them in an endless scrolling loop.
Singles help people with limited attention spans, which seems to be the vast majority of people out there. I’ll admit it, including me. We just hope that they’re the gateway to inviting people to experience our music in the form it was meant to be experienced—the album format. We spent a lot of time crafting the song sequence, runtime, song lengths, etc. It’s a pity all this work is lost in a sea of algorithmically generated suggestions about what your next song should be.
SOURCE – Your video for Crow (Fear the Night) has received great views on YouTube. What can you tell us about the video shoot?
Van Labrakis (Vocals, Guitar) – Fate had it that in this album cycle we literally had to do everything twice! From the songs themselves, the album cover, the band photos and, of course, the music video for ‘Crow’. We were working for months on a production that didn’t come out the way we wanted to.
In a mild state of panic we contacted our friend Marcelle Marais, from the excellent band Vorlust. She had just wrapped up shooting her film SHRIEEK with her production company TriTonia Films, she had some down time was able to help us out. She did the ‘Crow’ video, literally, at the 11th hour.
We communicated what ‘Crow’ means to us as a song and we gave her free reign to do whatever she wanted to. She came up with that amazing video in only a couple of weeks. It was unreal. She captured how we felt about the song and the essence of the whole album perfectly. A crazy fact is that for some stupid reason we forgot to share the album cover and band photos with her, yet she picked literally the identical red color background we had on the cover and band photos. She also painted that floor red herself the night before the video shoot.
I can go on and on praising Marcelle and how amazing she is. And this is really the essence of this album for us. We are a community. We are not just 4 people in a band that made this album. It took an army.
SOURCE – In today’s streaming age, music videos are still essential for promoting new releases. What do you think makes a music video impactful in the digital landscape?
Van Labrakis (Vocals, Guitar) – A good music video, in my opinion, elevates the song itself. Music is such a cerebral experience, very similar to reading a book. When some film director casts Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role of Frodo Baggins, you know… it won’t work! That’s not what most of us imagined Frodo looked like.
The right music video keeps the mystique and allure of the song alive and guides you through it. It’s not an easy task. The moment something is off or just not cool, the illusion breaks. Marcelle really did half the work for us. If that visual content she paired with our album was wrong, the whole thing would crumble.
There’s something to be said about consumption again. So many people would not press play on a song unless there is visual candy waiting for them alongside it. It’s a shame, but it is what it is. Again, if we can lure people in and invite them to experience the album, great! It seems to have worked with Crow. The amount of exposure we got from it was really a new experience for us.
SOURCE – What are your thoughts on virtual shows and online events as new revenue sources for metal bands? Have you seen a significant financial return from such events?
Van Labrakis (Vocals, Guitar) – There was some excitement and hope there during the pandemic, but I personally have lost all interest in that front. I love playing shows, in the real world. I want to wait in line to use the bathroom, you know? Haha… One thing that is really recent for me is that I have come to terms with how limited my time actually is. I only have time to write songs, put them on records, and tour. We, as a band, at this moment in time, don’t have much time for anything else. We would much rather spend every minute we have focusing on these two tasks.
I love how available everything is on YouTube, and I love watching live shows from all eras. I couldn’t help but feel that I was watching a YouTube video when I signed up for some live streams. I don’t know… I’m not sold on the idea. Maybe I’m getting too old! Who knows?
SOURCE – How important is merchandising for a metal band’s income? Do you think fans are still invested in buying physical products like t-shirts and vinyl, or has that market changed?
Van Labrakis (Vocals, Guitar) – My personal journey in this industry started back in 1995. It has changed a lot since then. I got my first record deal in 2002, and I received more money for one song back then than most bands get for a whole album today. I kept getting better at it through the years, but the money kept getting less! It doesn’t matter. Money was never the reason I signed up for this.
The fans are the driving force behind everything here. If our music didn’t resonate with people, we wouldn’t be able to keep going. Streaming services, especially for a band of our size, are pretty much a joke. Revenue only comes from merchandise sales and touring. The t-shirt and vinyl sales alone are what fund our band and all our album production costs.
Thankfully, touring in the US is profitable enough to make sense financially. It would help if we didn’t all live in the most expensive city in the world, San Francisco! But we love it here.
SOURCE – In retrospect, how much of your success do you attribute to hard work versus being in the right place at the right time?
Van Labrakis (Vocals, Guitar) – 100% hard work. There are no shortcuts here. It takes so much effort to make a good album; you can’t bypass the thousands of hours we all put into our instruments, into demoing material, touring, working on our interpersonal differences, showing up, etc. You have to show up.
When we were trying to find a label for the first album, we sent it out to 50 or so labels. We got 48 No’s before we heard the first Yes. You just have to keep at it. The right place is the studio, and the right time is every day!
SOURCE – Other than album promotion, what other plans do you and the rest of the band have?
Van Labrakis (Vocals, Guitar) – We have an album release show in the Bay Area in a couple of weeks. We also just announced our East Coast tour with our friends, Savage Master. Funny enough, we’ve been together for 7 years as a band, and this will be the first time for us on the East Coast. After that, we are working on getting over to Europe and South America, but we can’t announce anything yet.
We are also deep in the production of our next album, the fourth NITE album. I’d say we’re halfway done. We’ve been working at it for a year already, so I think we’ll need at least another year to be done. It takes time. You just have to show up and do the work.
Photo Credit: @newpleasure.photos
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