Swedish Dead Kosmonaut are back with their third full-length album "Retrospectre" (read review here). Presenting some traditional heavy metal, this actually isn't what you might expect when you read about the line-up of the band having some more extreme metal musicians on board. I had the pleasure talking to the man behind Dead Kosmonaut, Mattias Reinholdsson (bass, backing vocals), about the quite interesting history of the band and of course about "Retrospectre" itself. Enjoy reading and check the album out via Edge Circle Productions now.

Michael

Hi Mattias, how are things going on in Sweden? Is it as warm as in Germany?

Yeah, the last day haven't been very pleasant, actually. It has been quite a cold July spring time but now it's nice.

Maybe you can introduce Dead Kosmonaut to our readers? Maybe not too many guys are aware of the band, I guess.

Maybe so. How can present my band? I think the idea of that band grew many years ago and I wanted to play some sort of more old-school heavy metal. The style of heavy metal that was popular in the early 80s, so I wanted to have a band that had great guitar players, a great vocalist and strong melodies. That's what we aimed for with Dead Kosmonaut. It's that hard and that simple.

"Retrospectre" is Dead Kosmonauts third full-length album after the 2020 output "Gravitas". Why took it so long to release the follow-up?

It's no secret that we had the pandemic when we released "Gravitas". It came out in January of 2020, so it was at the very beginning of the pandemic. First, we didn't really know how long this is going to go on nor how serious this is. For the first half-a-year we sort of waited to see if we could go out and play some gigs. The first year we took it easy and tried to see where the pandemic is going. But it became apparent that this is not going to go away and there probably won't be any gigs plans so I thought to start on working on new songs, record them and be ready with the new album and release it when the thing is over. But different reasons and it's really not my place to go into details, a few of the members had some private obstacles that held things back and what I had head in my mind was that we would be recording in a year or something, but it turned out to take much longer. When we had the album ready which was last summer, and maybe you know we had a record deal with High Roller Records in Germany, it turned out that High Rollers calendar for releases was booked for more than a year ahead. So we had to decide if we would wait for another year to put out this album although we're already this late. I had a discussion with Stefan, who is running the label, and we thought that it would be better to look for another label not to withhold and delay the album even more. But as you might know since you are a metal journalist, we had a few of those middle-range metal labels almost haven't dragged quite a few bands and always having a band like Dead Kosmonaut. I mean we're unfortunately not top shelf and would sort of put down in the queue and that also delayed. We were talking to labels trying to find a deal that we were satisfied with. Private obstacles, the world in general (laughs), all these things months on months that literally ran through our fingers like the sands of time. So finally here we are a few years later.

And you ended up on Edged Circle Productions so this is pretty good.

Yeah, they seem anxious to work with Dead Kosmonaut and Frederik (Folkare; M.), our guitar player / producer/ mixer had worked with them on a previous project, and he said that they were great guys to work with. So we contacted them and they were one of the labels we had negotiations with.

Frederik worked with them for In Aphelion and this was also a great album. I checked "Gravitas" and I would say that "Retrospectre" has become much more heavy metal-like, lesser 70s Black Sabbath- influenced. Would you agree with me here?

Yes, I think it's a bit by chance because with that kind of heavy metal we're playing I tend to go for what I think is fresh, interesting and exciting to me. For some reason, and I can't really explain this, the idea of Dead Kosmonaut had more an element of doom metal in it. But as it turned out while I was working on some songs for this album, I didn't really had that many good ideas in that doom metal style and also I tried to make the songs a bit more compact, more robust and not dwell too long on things and get to the core of the song a bit more slim. I think it's not purely by design but by inspiration and also the philosophy that I had with me when we started to work on these songs. As you might have noticed I am not the sole songwriter for the songs. Pelle "Hellbutcher" wrote one of the songs and that one is actually the slow one. It's not really doom but in the more 70s, slow, majestic kind of hard rock / metal. Our drummer Henrik (Johansson; M.) wrote the song that is the title track of the album and this one is more prog rock , trying to be more adventurous in its style, a bit epic.

And it evolves a lot from almost a ballad to a cool heavy metal song.

Yes!

So with Pelle in the band and you wearing an Iron Maiden shirt there are a lot of Iron Maiden influences on this album, especially in the first two songs. Is it some kind of worship, too?

Yeah, I think all of us in the band are Maiden fans since we were very young in the 80s. For me personally, and it might sound a bit weird, perhaps not now but I used to have some sort of problem when I came up up with ideas that sound too much like Iron Maiden I won't do them. When you grow up you don't want to be like your parents (laughs). So I constantly tried to stay away  if it's too Maiden-ish.  If it's too obvious Iron Maiden, and believe me I have come up with power chords and chord progressions and stuff like that is way more Maiden than it's here on the album, so I might not do that. If I were to go track-by-track and I don't mean especially the latest album but all the songs on the Dead Kosmonaut albums, I think I could pinpoint direct influences from Judas Priest more than Iron Maiden actually, also even more from early 80s Black Sabbath, "Mob Rules" and "Heaven And Hell". That is a bigger influence when it comes to Dead Kosmonaut but when it comes to vocals and melodies, it is a bit Bruce Dickinson-ish.

There is one track, "The Lies" that appears to be quite unusual, at least for me. It sounds like what was called modern in the 90s, a little bit grunge or nu-metal-like. Did you plan to do some more experimental stuff with that here?

How did that song happen? What I originally had was the drum and the bass part. To me it sounded a lot like Queensyrche. Maybe not the early Queensryche but from around "Empire" or a bit earlier than that. So I had the bass and the drums and the vocal melody and I started to write words and then I got stuck with that song. I couldn't get it any further and asked Frederik if he had some guitar ideas or if he could hear where this song could go. I asked him in the past if he wanted to write any songs or for ideas for Dead Kosmonaut and he told me that I was Dead Kosmonaut. So I didn't count on him to help me out with that song but he came up with the guitar parts and the last bit. We jammed a bit to see where things would go. If you think back, the second to last song on most albums, usually is just a filler. It is some sort of thrown-away track, right? In my head if you have the second to last track, that is like a wild card. It could be anything. It could be like a weird acoustic track, a short instrumental, the song where you really don't know where to fit cause you have to have a great finale. The last track must be something that you remember. In my head it's still the vinyl age – I still listen to it and by vinyl. First , I think of albums like side A – first and last song on side A. It should make an impact with the first track on the second side and when you come to second to last song, you're free to do whatever you want. You can take a risk. You can do something that is a bit unexpected. Most of the other songs are more obvious and easy to write because they were kind of chorus / verse / bridge. They almost wrote themselves. But "The Lies" is probably the song that we spent the most time working on the part and even when we recorded it, it was the song that we worked on the vocals the most. But in the end I think it turned out like a great song. I don't necessarily know if it's a live song yet, let's see how it feels like when we get out and play. Now at the third album we have quite a few songs to choose from when we play gigs. We're not a band that play all the songs from the new album and I think we have to acknowledge that we are not a super established band , we have to present our material a bit and pick and choose from all albums.

Do you already have some live plans outside of Sweden?

Now we have only planned "Hell Over Hammaburg" for next March so we are coming to Germany. We've played "Markthalle" in 2018 at that festival and I think it was an absolute fantastic venue. It's a big place but you can still see everyone in the audience because of the terraces and the layout of the place. I absolutely love "Markthalle".

With Hellbutcher on the vocals and guitarist Frederik Folkare of Unleashed you have some more extreme metal guys on board. Is Dead Kosmonaut the heavy metal playground for you that you cannot have with the other bands in a certain way?

We haven't really talked about that but I don't really think so. For me, Dead Kosmonaut is a classic hard rock or heavy metal band. We're all the same generation but me personally, I never played in a death metal band. Me and Hendrik have played in a band called "Book Of Hours" way back and we played some more progressive hard rock. Our new guitar player Peter (Hallgren; M.) is also in Sorcerer but we all have the same background, growing up in Sweden and being at the same age. So we're influenced by the mid-80s and bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath. But I think my generation didn't tend to play classic heavy metal but tend to go more to extreme metal. All these bands like Unleashed or Entombed, we're the same generation and grew up on the same music. About Pelle, let me tell you why he is in the band. He's been screaming his lungs out in Nifelheim and now in Hellbutcher and I was told by a mutual friend, Michael Persson from TPL Records, the label that put out our first album "Expect Nothing" – I was trying to be the singer of the band at that time and I was a okay-ish kind of singer and I always was trying to get a proper singer on one song and that is why we have Johan Langquist from Candlemass – and then Michael Persson told me about Pelle. I know Pelle since the mid90s because we're Iron Maiden fans. Micke told me that Pelle was a good singer and there was this Swedish band "Mercy" where Messiah (Marcolin; M.) was singing in. So there was a tribute for "Mercy" where Nifelheim was playing and in his clean voice doing the Messiah songs and when I heard that my jaw just dropped. I thought that he was fantastic and he was the voice! I got on the phone immediately and asked if he was interested in my project. First he was a bit hesitant but then he heard the songs and sort of worked into it. Even though Pelle has this black metal background, we all listen to the same bands anyway. All the references when we write and talk about songs, the sound and the production, everyone has the same like "we want a Martin Birch sound for that and we want to go for that like Judas Priest….". So I think even though he hadn't done this before it was 100% serious and to me it's the same because I have a pretty strong idea about what I want Dead Kosmonaut to be. That was a really long answer for a short question, I'm sorry!

Coming to the lyrics, is there a special topic that you have on "Retrospectre"?

When I started to work writing lyrics, it's a bit of a struggle. It's not easy for me to write lyrics. You might know from the past that I work with an American guy called John Gaffney who has a band called "Sinister Realm". They're not very active anymore but they put out a few albums and I've known him for about twenty years. In the past when I got stuck and couldn't find the right words or it didn't match my expectations, I turned to him and asked if he could help me out. When I started to work on these songs I thought to myself that it would be easier to write the lyrics if I have a theme, some sort of frame work that I can work within. It is the one of memories, hindsight and how the past affects your daily life, things of what could have been or has been and what they mean to you now. In all the lyrics there is no story but there is this theme and if we take the song "The Lies" we have talks about earlier, it is about that you sometimes lie to yourself to make your history more pleasant or more manageable. Maybe you you've been in a destructive relationship and you want to block that out, maybe it wasn't that bad. So you lie to yourself to live. All the other songs are looking on the same thing but from different angles and mindsets. I also think of the visual thing as well, the photographs, the cover and stuff like that. For the vinyl and CD release it will be the front of the cover will tell you a story when you go through the pages of the booklet. The front of the cover is like the first step and then you go further steps into that picture or where the picture comes from. It's a bit of overly ambitious, I think (laughs). We are the same age and when we grew up, you could these albums where the sleeves could also tell a story. It could also be a part of the narration or the story of the album. I think this part is very much missing today when you only listen to streaming and have this little thumbnail-sized image on your mobile. If you do the effort of buying the CD or vinyl you get something more of the story of "Retrospectre". I think the people who will buy the album will enjoy that because it's part of the package.

That's a good contextual transition for my next question - is there a connection between the album cover and the band name? The guy in front of the mirror reminds me a lot of Vladimir Putin, was he shot into space?

No, that's a pure coincidence that he looks like Vladimir Putin (laughs). First of all, the name "Dead Kosmonaut" came from when I was growing up in the 70s. You could hear people on TV talk about cosmonauts and astronauts. To me growing up it was just someone who was going up into space and I really wasn't aware if it were Soviets or from the US. When I picked the name for the band, and actually "Dead Kosmonaut" is the third name of the band, because at first it was called "Astrakaan" but there was another Swedish band that put out an album under that same name and the name was in the trash can, then I came up with "Domkraft" and the same thing happened again with a band from Gothenburg and so I had to come up with a third name. I had this doom metal song from "Gravitas" which is called "Dead Kosmonaut". That song isn't about cosmonauts at all but about someone who is feeling very depressed and very tired of life, disconnected from the real world. He is totally estranged from what is actually going on on Earth and the people around him so he rather wants to be a dead cosmonaut and not to be here anymore. Originally the name was for another project but took that song for the name. When we made this album, the idea for the cover is that the Retrospectre is holding the mirror and that guy what you call Putin is the old man who is a bit stuck in the past. In his mind is that he was that cosmonaut, this famous guy going into space doing adventurous, marvelous stuff. But now he is old. In his mind the Retrospectre tells him that this is the real he but we all can see that this is an old man. He is not the spacefarer anymore but in the autumn years of his life. That is the concept behind the sleeve. And I think the guy, to model for that must be about at least 40 or 50 centimeters taller than Vladimir Putin (laughs). When you look into the booklet you can see him on a photo. It's an old work mate of mine whom I asked to be a photo model for the shoot actually.

Which three bands would you choose to play with – active or retired?

Oh, I mean the obvious ones but still active today.

Let me guess, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest?

Iron Maiden is first, second and third place and then I would go for Judas Priest and after that for Metallica just for the exposure, because they're so big (laughs).