Svarttjern - Interview


Although I have followed the band for many years now, I guess to most people listening to black metal, Svarttjern is still quite unknown. I hope that with their latest album "Draw Blood" this situation will change for the band because they are for over twenty years a stable constant in the Norwegian black metal scene. I had a very interesting chat with their vocalist Hans Fyrste about the album, lyrics and the band. Although some words might be irritating, don't forget that it all is about art and entertainment.

Michael

Hi Hans, thanks for having me here today – how are you doing?

Hey, thanks for showing the interest! I'm fine, just got back from a little trip to Oslo, sat down and now I'm here with you. What about you?

I have a little cold but all fine, thanks. "Draw Blood" – the title sounds brutal and so does the music. You sound much thrashier than before, did you want to create your "Bonded By Blood" with the new album? I mean, you covered the track on the previous album already…

Well, I don't know. The album came together over a time but definitely we have gone toward more rock n'roll, thrashy feel. I think we don't even have a blast beat on the album. We simplified things without being simple, so yeah, it might be a more old school way to go but it just feels natural for us.

What do you want to express with the title?

It kind of depends on how you see it. Of course you can see it in more of an art-see-way where draw blood, opening up the flesh, bleeding out can mean a lot of things in today's modern world like society and all that shit works. To me it's really simple. "Draw Blood" means cut your risks and bleed out. Maybe I have to wash my words but it's an encouragement to commit suicide. But it also means way more. Draw your blood to something, commit to something, and dedicate your blood to something.

You really want to tell the people to commit suicide?

It's a hard question to answer because it doesn't take much before you get pushed into a group or a reference where people may misunderstand and misinterpret things. But in many ways yes, but it is also an artistic expression. From a misanthropic standpoint I would definitely urge people to remove themselves from this world.

Hm…maybe not everybody?

It's kind of a thing – a lot of lyrical themes in Svarttjern has been about hitting people in the sub-consciousness. You can read something and some people will think about the title "Draw Blood" that they get the sense of it, the suicidal aspect. What does it do to you, how does your body feel? Do you get a bad feeling inside, does it move something in you? I think I'm after those things and using Satan and all of that, it's used up. I don't express myself that way. I would much better express myself with a really aggressive way – I've used suicide, murder and grotesque scenes since day one.

I'm asking because an old classmate committed suicide a few days ago and I knew a lot of people who did that before which really shocked me.

I'm really sad to hear that! I have to say that of course I do respect an opinion like that and I would never ever confront you with it. So much of my freedom in my speech comes through expressing myself through music. I'm singing a lot about the real basic instincts in humans but that doesn't mean that I live in a cave. I will not meet a guy at the public and tell him to commit suicide. It's an artistic expression.

I think I understand what you mean. You won't get out and tell everybody to kill themselves.

Haha, it depends on which day you ask me and how much wine I had.

Lyrically you sing about lust and desire but also pain and self-injury and this was always more in the focus than this Satan stuff. What is the philosophy behind Svarttjern?

Misanthropy. It started out with the first album. I was only reading as a teenager when Svarttjern started out, before we even had a demo or anything. I was just reading about philosophy. I discovered that if I want to express myself personally I have to do it in a way that nobody understands what I'm actually telling them. On the first three albums the lyrics are totally fucked up. You can read something but it means something completely different. I got into this numerology and all the lyrics were like coded into messages and a numerology value system which actually on the second album got me hospitalized. I guess when growing older and getting more life experience, I think a lot of the things I didn't want people to understand but to shock with, inflict something in their sub consciousness, today is a big fuck you. Today the lyrics are more straight forward and I want them to be punchy. They must hit you in the guts, I wanted to hurt a bit and it's about playing around with grotesque fantasies and thoughts and urges of death.

The cover looks like a medieval painting with some undead / demons planning something wicked. Did you take it from an already existing picture or was it created for the album?

It's a guy from Hate Couture, he is a good friend of us and we actually bought the rights to do it for the last album "Shame Is Just A Word" but we ended up using something different because it's more of a cross-reference, more of an internal thing in the band. We had a single on the previous album called "Prince Of Disgust" and the guys on the "Draw Blood" album is "The Prince Of Disgust". So we bring him further into everything, also because we sing and write so much about today is kind of rejoiced by him. It has become like a mantra for us, I guess. So it was kind of coincidence when we bought the rights to the photo and ended up using it on a later album where it doesn't really fit but it fits if you know the story.

Your vocals are much more diverse compared to the previous albums. You scream, mourn and yell like never before and this gives the songs this special touch to grip the lyrics…was it your intention to let the listener get more grip to the songs - this suffering, the pain?

First of all, thank you. Yeah, I guess so. It was really cool doing the vocals for the album because the whole band was together while I was doing it. We were really sparring back and forth with ideas from everybody. One of the main things is when I do vocals on my albums everything is first take, everything is just straight forward. Of course it's been planned and written but it's just let's go for it! If it sounds like shit, we just don't use it. I think maybe over the years, with getting more experience and so on, I just really let myself loose and I wanted to sound like me and also different from other vocalists. So yeah, I want people to kinda feel the lyrics perhaps.

As I already said, thrash is even more omnipresent than before and in my review I wrote that you sound a lot like old Sodom, Kreator and stuff like that. Although in "Lick My Flesh" there are even some cool rock n' roll elements that sound like Motörhead. What are your main inspirations when it comes to metal music?

For me it's very hard to answer it in kind of a musical aspect but now that we were doing several interviews I sat down and read a lot of the answers from HaaN who is doing most of the songs. His answer to that is just nothing really. There is nothing that has typically inspired us now but I do believe that if we go back to what we used to listen to when we started listen to metal, it was the Big Four obviously within thrash and that still sticks. I wouldn't say that the album is inspired by it but I believe that it's a product of it.

Where do you get your inspirations for the lyrics from?

From my weird head (laughs). I don't know. I think the inspiration just grows over time. It's like if you're writing a book, the inspiration comes here and there and when I do, I don't have a pen and paper, I have a phone. Maybe I hear something, a sentence or just construct a sentence out of a situation you're in. And that captures me like that's something special and I will write it down. I might kind of build something out of that in a way. I get inspired by being outside in the nature, sleeping in the summer in the forest – just being alone.

Well, that's very misanthropic!

But on the other hand I have two kids and 50% of the time I am a regular dad, you know? So it is misanthropic but I believe to be a modern misanthrope. Also towards Satanism you have to have a certain balance in which role you're taking.

The band exists since 2003 and you have a very stable line-up where only the bass changed sometimes. What's the secret for the band stability?

Alcohol (laughs)! I don't know – when we begun, we all were lucky getting together as guys. For the continued success of actually sticking together for so many years, we never compromised on the individual as long as we move forward as one unit. It's a really weird question! Maybe the other guys have a good answer to it, I really don't because it's just natural for us. We're just a bunch of old friends. When we hit the road and do gigs it's the best fucking time ever! When we're high-fiving at the airport it's like being little kids again, having a good time together. I think it's also a trust aspect: we respect each other a lot, if somebody needs more time in a certain status of life or if somebody needs to be pushed a little bit, we're going from kids or teenagers to adults – I'm getting forty in a few years. All of that evolvement has shaped us as persons and also as a band. I guess none of us is an asshole, if you get it. We're good guys to each other and protecting each other. Malphas is the new bassist and he has been there for ten years – he just fits right in.

Although you released six albums so far, you still have this underground status and aren't one of the big ones in the scene, which I actually don't understand. Do you have an explanation for this?

I guess when we released our first album "Misanthrophic Path Of Madness" the timing was really good. There was a couple of also smaller bands from Norway coming out and a lot of things started to happen, but all the bands were still in the shadow of two generations of bands above us. Of course, the really big ones like Immortal, Mayhem, Emperor from the first wave and so many bands from the second wave. So we got record deals and got things going but we always were pushed down into the underground also because the new black metal, and I would say that I am from that, is really unpolished and brutal and it doesn't fit everywhere. I don't really check out many new bands but I listen to the older bands all the time because I know how it works and I think that and also a lot of the guys not caring so much has led to that really good bands never really got anywhere, whilst other bands really wanted to go somewhere and maybe adapted to there maybe. I don't say that it's negative but it doesn't really fit to us and at one point we got hooked up by NoiseArt Records which is a really big label and we got put on tour with Cradle Of Filth and Behemoth and really got an opportunity to move forward. But when the record label told us that we couldn't call our album like we wanted to do and that we couldn't use the artwork we wanted to use, we just said "fuck it!". If we were making a million bucks, yeah sure, why not but we're not. We're just regular guys with jobs playing black metal. Also we weren't live, timing-wise, it never really worked out for us but that's not negative either. At the last release we were looking at doing something but then Corona came. That's why this release really means a lot to us because we've been like re-united as a really strong force. So I hope that now things really happen and I am ambitious just like the rest of the guys as well to do that. We will remain in the underground but everybody who stands in our way will be pushed aside.

I had to laugh when I heard the new cover song which is "Under My Thumbs" by the Rolling Stones. What the hell did you smoke to cover exactly this one?

We really liked doing Exodus on the last album. It was fun and was like a teenage thing. It meant a lot to us and we headbanged the shit out of heads at that song. Now we wanted also to do a cover and we actually completed a different cover. I can't say which one because we're probably going to release it later. Everything out there today is so sensitive and we're a non-political band. When it comes to race, whom you chose to love, whom you chose to identify yourself – we don't give a fuck. We have no opinion at all. But we did one cover and said that we can't release it because then we would be put into a category of band that disrespects all the movements. This will rob us from opportunities that we want to get. Our drummer Audun got the idea of covering The Rolling Stones with "Under My Thumb". I am a huge fan and I really grew up with The Rolling Stones. The melody and the song has a vibe to it which we wanted to explore. I didn't know how to but the guys did (laughs) and the lyrics are in today's world as edgy as fuck. You're talking about a female who is under my thumb – that's what Mick Jagger is saying. Nowadays it is not okay. But still so much of the album also reflects that – how I proceed myself in many ways artistically. Having people under my thumb myself is also this Prince Of Disgust-thing and the lyrics also matches to us in a weird way. So Audun had it as a suggestion and first I refused. Then we started working o it and it kinda grew on me and I liked it. We had such a good time in the studio while recording it. We had another guy doing the backing vocals, I'm not gonna say his name because we don't like that name-dropping, and he is also talking a lot of shit during the solo which is really funny. We had done the whole day doing all the vocals and we parted in the evening, got up in the morning and we recorded the song, trying to get sober.

Thanks for answering my questions – the final words are yours!

We do really feel people reaching out to Svarttjern and we get this respectful vibe which we weren't really aware of and we appreciate that. We're really looking forward to keep moving forward and getting the support from the listeners out there. That means a lot to us. Thank you, Michael!

Entered: 1/16/2025 9:41:34 AM

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