In the end “The Wild Hunt”, the new album from Swedish black metal band Watain, has come out, four years after “Lawless Darkness”. It was released on August 19 in Europe and August 20 in USA, and after only ten days, Watain’s new release met with huge success: it was first in Swedish charts while in USA it sold around 2,700 copies in its first week of release to debut at position No. 158 on The Billboard 200 chart.
“The Wild Hunt” took such a hard and intensive work, that the band spent most of 2013 in the studio. In an interview with Metro Stockholm, singer Eric Danielsson said that he has been able to spend only 4 or 5 weeks this year at his home in Uppsala. In this interview Eric said that it is very important that the right atmosphere arises: "I do not understand people who can go in a sterile studio and just record. When we go into a studio, we go into our own", said Eric to the Swedish local newspaper, showing the premises of the recording studio with walls rigorously painted in black, furnished with bones and coffins and scented by incense smokes.
Eric said that when the band is at work, they enter a kind of monastic life. Watain is a spiritual band, even if their spirituality is not a religious one; anyway Eric points out that this spiritual element is important so that everything tallies, music, worldview and stage performance. The intense work and the full immersion in a spiritual, monastic life have produced a new album that is different from the previous ones, and that according to Eric is introspective and inward-looking and does not talk about only brutally lawless darkness.
"It’s been 15 remarkable years and now we wanted to give voice to new aspects, such as melancholy and silence. We wanted to open the door to the world we have built and let people peek in it."
Text by Herjann
“The Wild Hunt” took such a hard and intensive work, that the band spent most of 2013 in the studio. In an interview with Metro Stockholm, singer Eric Danielsson said that he has been able to spend only 4 or 5 weeks this year at his home in Uppsala. In this interview Eric said that it is very important that the right atmosphere arises: "I do not understand people who can go in a sterile studio and just record. When we go into a studio, we go into our own", said Eric to the Swedish local newspaper, showing the premises of the recording studio with walls rigorously painted in black, furnished with bones and coffins and scented by incense smokes.
Eric said that when the band is at work, they enter a kind of monastic life. Watain is a spiritual band, even if their spirituality is not a religious one; anyway Eric points out that this spiritual element is important so that everything tallies, music, worldview and stage performance. The intense work and the full immersion in a spiritual, monastic life have produced a new album that is different from the previous ones, and that according to Eric is introspective and inward-looking and does not talk about only brutally lawless darkness.
"It’s been 15 remarkable years and now we wanted to give voice to new aspects, such as melancholy and silence. We wanted to open the door to the world we have built and let people peek in it."
Text by Herjann