Dan Myhrer Of Interviewed by Jon Seymour for the music now, instead of for who we are. Perhaps people were kind of surprised by us, as in Sabaton, it was always Joakim that did all of the writing, so we were always in the background and maybe people just didn’t expect us to be able to write any music at all, but we’re really pleased with what we’ve done.
There was obviously a lot of media coverage after the very public splitting from Sabaton, so what’s the story behind the new band? The whole thing started quite early, in fact only a few days after we left the band. We got together and started talking about maybe starting a covers band, just so we could keep playing, as a hobby maybe, as it’s really quite hard just to quit the music business. We even thought about maybe starting a Sabaton tribute band at one point. Then we got to hear that Nils was interested in joining us, so we arranged a meeting and started talking. We also had our old roadie Stefan that had offered to play bass, so we were sitting there with a complete band again. After that, things started moving really quickly. We started writing our own material, and we got offers from a couple of record labels, even before they’d heard any of our music. I think they were more interested in our names, than they were in our music. We already had a lot of publicity from the split, so anything we did was going to be picked up by the media pretty quickly. We’re very pleased now though, as the music we’ve put out on the EP, and the singles has been really well received, so people are starting to like us
“
I’ve seen a few reviews of the album myself, and there are always going to be comparisons to your old band, and some people say that “it’s just Sabaton with a different singer.” Is it hard to get out of the shadow of Sabaton? Yes it’s really hard. For instance, when people hear I Will Rule The Universe for the first time, they’re going to think of The Art Of War as it’s maybe a similar melody. But the rest of the music we’ve tried a little to get away from the typical Sabaton sound. We’d been playing with them a long time before we left though, and that was all we knew how to do. Suddenly we have our own band, but it was hard not to sound like our old band. We could have tried not to sound like them, but the music wouldn’t have been so good. People also would have had some expectations of what we might sound like, and maybe if we put out something that was completely different, it would have done more harm than good to us. We wanted to give people something they could recognise, and a flash back to the roots of where we came from. Sabaton had been in our blood for such a long time, so detoxing from that is going to take a long time.
“
So you’ve just released the single St Patrick’s Day from the forthcoming album The Killer Angels, when is the album due for release? The pre-orders will be shipped on the 23rd May, but the album is officially released on 11th of June I think, so a couple of weeks to go yet. We’ve seen a few reviews already, and mostly they’ve been pretty good, which is encouraging.
I just didn’t want to see anyone
40
Firebrand Magazine