With "Reign Of The Reaper" Swedish epic doomsters Sorcerer recently released a superb fourth full-length album (read review here). I had the great pleasure talking to vocalist Anders Engberg via Zoom about the differences to its predecessor and the reasons for that and of course about the band, their influences and dreams and not to forget the album in general. Enjoy reading!

Michael

Hi Anders, how are you doing?

I'm doing great, actually. Riding on the waves of success (laughs).

Congratulations for "Reign Of The Reaper"! I hadn't expected such a strong album by you after I was a little bit disappointed with "Lamenting Of The Innocent". How glad are you with the receptions so far?

We're very very happy. We felt that we had a strong album but you never know. As you said, you weren't that happy with Lamenting Of The Innocent and we thought that it was great (laughs). So you never know but we always try to do our very best and only the best songs go on our albums and we're super happy with it.

Well, it wasn't a bad album at all but when I listened to it I thought, hm… something is missing. You have tightened the songs pretty much and didn't use these overlong parts anymore. How much was this a reaction to the fans' feedback to "Lamenting"?

A little bit but we also wanted to progress. When we go into the next album we think about if we are gonna change the cover artist, we gonna do some new things on the cover, do some other stuff with the lyrics and get some contemporary influences in music – so we always think it through. We always write music from the heart so to speak but this time we wanted to do a shorter album like in old-school format – A and B-side with a maximum of 50 minutes. That is what fits on a vinyl record to get quality. That was our main objective and as you said we have some pretty long tracks. I think the longest is like 6:40 or something (6:34; M.) so there are longer songs but not in the way we write sometimes with 8 or 9 minutes with a lot of instrumental parts and stuff like that. We actually had to cut down a few songs to make them fit into the format but in the end I feel that it's a really nice mix of songs that have different tempo and are different in style. I'm very happy with the finished result.

Apart from tightening the songs you have incorporated much more epic, catchy and rousing elements in tracks like the title track, 'Morning Star' or my favorite track 'Break Of Dawn'. Was this intentional or did you add these parts gradually?

When we started with our comeback album In The Shadow Of The Inverted Cross, most of the songs and ideas were written by Johnny Hagel, our original bass player. He's still around in the background. He writes stuff still but he doesn't play live anymore. So when we progressed from the first album into the second one, Peter Hallgren also started writing material for the album. Now we were three people writing music and for Lamenting Of The Innocent Justin Biggs, the bass player came in and wrote some stuff. We're always kind of progressing in the way we write. We don't think about "oh now we gonna do something contemporary that we will like"….it's not like that. We always write what we like and some of these songs that are on the album maybe should have been longer if we let us evolve in the same direction that we did before but we wanted to kind of progress a little bit and also I think that we wanted to widen our audience a little bit. With shorter songs maybe it's also good that you gonna be played on radio and stuff like that. Of course we think about that but we don't sacrifice our music writing to do it.

You already mentioned Johnny Hagel – he is listed as "musical director" and "a shadow member" on metal-archives...

He is the founding member of the band so he owns the spirit of the band. He helps us out with different stuff in the background, record label stuff, web page and so on. He wants to be involved but just this much. And he comes up with some ideas – I think 'Reign Of The Reaper' is his original idea but it doesn't sound like anything like it. He started that embryo of that song. It feels good to have his compass for the direction what we do. I've been around since the beginning also but we need to progress when we write music. That's the short story about Johnny. He's a good friend of mine and he's a good friend of the other guys.

Apart from the Tony Martin-era in Black Sabbath, I read that Manowar has a huge influence on you.

Yeah, at least for me but I can't answer for the rest of the guys (laughs). I really love Manowar.

So what do you think about their latest single with the absolutely not-matching German title?

They've seen better days but you can't erase the legacy that they got. I think they were really cool until "Kings Of Metal" but the best one is "Battle Hymns" I think. That's what Manowar is for me and when people relate to this in some of the songs, I don't know – maybe it is the choirs or the epic that they compare to Manowar. We are more melodic I think and more catch phrasing than they were.

Talking about the lyrics - while "Lamenting Of The Innocent" was about the witch hunts back in the 16th and 17th century, do we have another concept album with "Reign Of The Reaper"?

It's just coincidence really but when we started writing for this album we had like 15 musical ideas. We didn't have any title or anything. We were also in communication with the new guy that was gonna make the artwork for the album but somehow our time schedule didn't fit. So when we started writing the music and the melodies we still didn't have a cover art to match with the lyrics. So we panicked a little bit. We had to find this one work that we can use on the next album and we had to find something new to draw ideas from. We started looking at fantasy pages on the internet and it was our manager who found this image which actually became the album cover. He said that this was really cool and we fell in love with it. Then the detective work started to get to know who's done it. It turned out to be a guy in Sweden, 1 ½ hours from Stockholm up in the north. We asked him if we could use it and he agreed. That was a perfect match for what we wanted to do and what we feel where we are now. It's a good image to show what Sorcerer is all about. When we started writing lyrics we drew from that and I think because there is the reaper on the cover, a lot of the lyrics came to be about death in different perspectives. Death in battle, death in dying of old age…I together with Conny (Welén; M.) we write the melodies for the tracks and we always have some bullshit lyrics for the tracks. I have to sing something to present it to the other guys and some of that bullshit lyrics are actually pretty good so we used that. Justin our bass player who is Canadian, he is a really good lyricist. He takes these small bits and pieces of what we've done and writes the final lyrics. And that's the last thing that's finished before we go to the studio and record the album.

You have a special CD edition where you can get the "Reverence" EP. Why did you decide to record the EP?

When we did the EP, we did it like a break in between the old and the new album. First we wanted to do one cover song. We looked for a pop or kind of odd song first but we couldn't agree on a song to do. So we said instead "okay, let'́s do something from bands that we like". Each band member had to pick four songs and then we voted and it came out to be four songs. It was supposed to be a pandemic video production where you stand in your kitchen and play your instrument. We started to do the drums first and then Peter and Kristian started to do the guitars and when we got it back for doing the vocals it sounded so good that we thought that we have to do it in a proper way. We actually quit that idea of doing a live thing and recorded a proper EP. The songs were picked because we love them (laughs). That period of the 70s and 80s is where we come from.

I was pretty surprised that you covered Ozzy Osbourne on the EP and not Candlemass!

It was important to show where our influences come from. We already interacted with Johan (Längquist; M.) on Lamenting Of The Innocent so people already knew that we were really big Candlemass fans. Also the logo and the old English it's homage to Candlemass all the way.

So which of these bands would you choose to play with if you had a time machine?

I would love to have played with Black Sabbath, of course. Tony Martin has been a big influence on me and all those albums that he sang on along with the Dio-era. I'm not too fond of Ozzy-era in Black Sabbath although I love him as a solo artist. That's strange but that's how I feel. I think the Black Sabbath-eras are better without Ozzy. He brought better music on his own. I also had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Tony here in Stockholm together. We sang 'The Shining' together and I choired for him because he lost his high range and I did all the higher parts for him. That was pretty cool!

And which actual band would you like to play with? At the moment there are some new cool epic (doom) metal bands active like Thronehammer, Below, Crypt Sermon…..

I would love to tour with our label brother in Below. That would be really cool. Candlemass, Sorcerer and Below – that would be a nice trio.

Do you have some plans to do some gigs?

Of course! More than ever. We're going to play in Poland with our brothers in Doomocracy from Greece early next year. Then there is a festival on 20th of April in Lünen, Germany and we're going with Blind Guardian on a Northern Europe tour in Oslo, Gothenburg, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. In March we are having a show in Malmö…yeah, a lot of shows! And hopefully there will be some more festivals, too.

The last words belong to you!

We're so happy of the album and how the reception of it has been from journalists and from people that are writing us each and every day telling us how great it is. We can't wait to get out and play it for you live. We're not a touring band but we will do for sure about 20 shows and we try to go where it is most convenient because of the economic side. Europe and Scandinavia for sure and we will see how it works with England and US.