Author: fgt

Dimmu Borgir did more than most bands to bring symphonic grandeur to black metal in the late 1990s. By the time of 2007’s In Sorte Diaboli they were still pushing boundaries, as Metal Hammer found out when we sat down with guitarist Silenoz to talk concept albums, success and Satanism.

One of the best ways to ensure that your career in music is a long and fruitful one is to keep your audience guessing. A total disregard for rules, regulations and received wisdom will probably come in handy too. If you’re not prepared to take risks and flick the occasional middle finger in the direction of the establishment, then you’re not really treading the path of true rock‘n’roll anyway, and no one likes a faker.

For Norwegian black metal bands, however, it’s never quite that simple. Thanks to a turbulent and controversial but creatively illustrious history and the rabid devotion that it has inspired in a generation of black-hearted listeners, the genre’s major players are constantly forced to negotiate the tricky tightrope that bridges the gulf between underground acceptance and success on a broader scale. If they stray too far towards the mainstream they will be crucified for selling out. If they fail to take the opportunities that come their way, they will forfeit any chance they may have had to take their music to a bigger (and currently growing) horde of potential acolytes.

More than any of the bands that emerged from Norway during the early 90s, Dimmu Borgir have taken on the puritanical critics, made no apologies for their ambitions and skilfully juggled their cherished integrity and prized credibility while still looking and sounding like bona fide rock stars. For long-time fans it has, at times, been a breathtaking, nail-biting thing to watch.

And now it’s 2007. Dimmu Borgir are the best selling Norwegian metal band by some considerable distance. They are poised on the brink of a level of success that no one would ever have thought possible a decade ago. After surviving a summer’s worth of Ozzfest shows back in 2004 and picking up a Norwegian Grammy shortly after, the band formed by vocalist Stian ‘Shagrath’ Thoresen and guitarist Sven Atle ‘Silenoz’ Kopperud back in 1993 have every reason to be happy with their lot.

But take a listen to their new album, In Sorte Diaboli, and you’ll hear the sound of a band who are still determined to push themselves and their fans. A conceptual piece that takes on religion and subjects it to a brutal but poetic roasting, it’s probably not what many people would expect Dimmu Borgir to be doing when huge commercial success is mere inches away. Neither does it exhibit the slightest hint of creative compromise.

Sonically vast, unrelenting in its intensity and aggression and yet disarmingly melodic, In Sorte Diaboli seems destined to confound and delight the faithful in equal measures. But, as Silenoz explains, such a bold move was no calculated attempt to ruffle feathers. It just kind of, you know, happened…

“The idea to do a concept album came about after we did Ozzfest in 2004,” he states. “We were going to have some kind of a break, but I can’t really sit still! (laughs) I have to be occupied with something, so I approached the other guys to see if they were up for writing some stuff that was different from our other albums. They thought it was a cool idea, so I started to write down some ideas and it took more and more shape over time. It wasn’t anything specific that I had in mind at first but it started to develop into a very personal thing.”

Concept albums are notoriously tricky things to get right. An endeavour often associated with the freakish self-indulgence of the 70s progressive rock scene, the notion of setting a stand-alone story to music has brought many careers to an abrupt end and caused many a critic to spit teeth. Somehow, though, Dimmu Borgir have pulled it off with something approaching casual disdain. Succinct, convincing and gripping from first moment to last, In Sorte Diaboli is simply the best thing the Norwegians have ever done.

“I was surprised how easy it actually was compared to what I expected,” laughs Silenoz. “When I first thought about a concept album I knew it wouldn’t be anything like [Queensryche’s 1988 concept album] Operation: Mindcrime, and it would be closer to the kind of thing King Diamond does. I guess it’s not as grand as people might expect it to be, with 12 minute songs and interludes and all that shit. How we made the music for this album is the same as we always do it, but it was a more spontaneous effort this time. We pretty much went back to how we made our first album. We to the practice room and started jamming.”

It would have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall at those practice sessions. Far from sounding like a load of hastily cobbled together ideas and musical fragments, In Sorte Diaboli is an album of great songs; something Dimmu Borgir have narrowly failed to accomplish in the past, despite the undeniable quality of much of their catalogue. And, as ever, the album sounds absolutely immense; a dazzling onslaught of Wagnerian bombast and gleaming metallic futurism, it’s the sound of class and talent colliding with cutting edge hardware. Let’s be brutally honest: it sounds expensive.

“We always want each album to sound better than the last one,” says Silenoz. “That’s really important. I guess they’re a little expensive to make, but I know there’s many other albums out there that cost 10 times as much. We’re just perfectionists!”

And so we come to the nitty gritty of In Sorte Diaboli. As concept albums go, it’s a distinctly flab-free and cohesive experience. It also boasts the most direct set of lyrics that Silenoz has ever written. Rather than take the traditional approach of basing the album on some revered literary work, the guitarist started from scratch and devised a compelling tale that perfectly suits Dimmu Borgir’s menacing aesthetics.

“The story is based in medieval times, and the theme focuses around this fictional character that I created,” he explains. “After years spent in priesthood in search of God, over the course of a few weeks he goes through a revelation and transforms spiritually and becomes what people believe to be the opposite of God, the Antichrist or whatever. The lyrics are his diaries, from his perspective, and describing his struggle to personal and spiritual victory and finally, his ultimate rejection of the concept of god and religion.”

What Silenoz fails to mention is that at the end of the album – and sincere apologies to anyone who wanted the ending to remain a surprise – the story’s central character ends up being burned to death for his irreligious behaviour. In many ways, this is not the most surprising thing for a black metal band to be writing about, but far from being a symptom of rebellious petulance and a desire to upset a few Christians, there is a genuine depth and power behind In Sorte Diaboli that stems from Silenoz’s own beliefs.

“Symbolically, it’s very close to the story of how Lucifer was cast out of heaven,” he states. “He was different from all the other angels and so he was a threat to society, because he was intelligent and smart and beautiful. Things that are unknown to people are always seen as dangerous. Even though I put the story in medieval times, it might as well be set in the present day or the future, because it’s still describing things that could happen at any time.”

Ambivalence towards religion is nothing new in metal, of course, but there are precious few bands whose contempt for Christianity – or any faith, for that matter – can be backed up by first hand experience. Perhaps unexpectedly, Silenoz’s dislike for religion was born when he was a young boy and attended, of all things, Sunday School.

“We used to have these cards and we would be given stars every time we met up,” he says. “I didn’t have as many stars as the other kids, and I just got the feeling that I wasn’t as good as the other kids because of that. Right then, I felt there was something bogus about the religious issue. I didn’t have a religious upbringing at all, so Sunday School was nothing that I was forced to do. I just wanted to interact with other kids the same age. It’s something you have to do when you grow up in the country, in the Norwegian bible belt. I guess you could say that I have to thank those people for the success of our band!”

So what exactly does Silenoz believe? Although Dimmu Borgir are frequent and enthusiastic users of S atanic imagery, they have never declared themselves to be out-and-out Satanists and, up until now, Silenoz’s lyrics have never strayed outside the realms of the cryptic. Does he believe in God or Satan?

“I really don’t want to put any labels on what I believe,” he shrugs. “I guess you could say that I don’t even consider myself to be an atheist. I base that on my own experiences both in the spiritual and physical world. It wouldn’t really be right to call myself an atheist. I guess I’m an agnostic person but in a very irreligious way!”

You don’t have to look further than the front page of a newspaper to see how religion impacts on the lives of people all over this planet. Dimmu Borgir may well be preaching to the converted, but as Silenoz ponders his own feelings about spirituality, morality and life’s big questions and expounds upon his conclusions for our entertainment, it’s plain that the days when black metal bands would shout mindlessly about Satan and hating the world, with little more than juvenile disenchantment to back it up, are long gone.

In Sorte Diaboli is a simple enough tale, but if it encourages a few metalheads to think, then it may prove to be a more important record than its creators ever intended. Failing that, we could just buy one of their new t-shirts, which come emblazoned with the slogan ‘Religion sickens me’, and upset a few God-fearing grannies just for the hell of it…

“These issues are difficult for people to talk about sometimes,” muses Silenoz. “So it’s cool for kids to be able to wear that shirt and take a stand! Religion never accepts the balance that exists in a human being. For me, religion was always just a one-way street. That’s always going to cause conflicts. Just look at the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. It’s all based on religious differences and nothing good has come out of it. It’s a never-ending topic, basically.”

Ironically, considering their fiercely anti-religious stance, Dimmu Borgir do seem to be blessed. While many of their peers are vilified for their ambition, Silenoz and his fellow misanthropes seem largely impervious to such slings and arrows. Maybe it’s because the real point of black metal has always been to follow a path of one’s own choosing and Dimmu Borgir are doing precisely that; proving that being “true” is about upholding your own principles and not giving a flying fuck what anyone else thinks. From Sunday School to ‘In Sorte Diaboli’: it’s been one hell of a trip so far, and it ain’t over yet. The dark side of the force is strong in these Nordic warriors. Who knows what they might achieve next?

“The way I see it is that what we do can never be truly mainstream,” concludes Silenoz. “Yeah, we sell a lot of albums, but look at Maiden, Slayer and Priest. They sell a lot of albums too, but none of them are getting played on mainstream TV and radio. Metal is genuine and has soul and it’s not designed to sell a lot of albums or make a lot of magazine covers. We’ve come far enough now that we’re able to make a living from doing this, and that’s an accomplishment in itself, but you never know what the future holds. Let’s just see how far the ride takes us.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer 166, May 2007

Dom Lawson has been writing for Metal Hammer and Prog for over 14 years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He also contributes to The Guardian, Classic Rock, Bravewords and Blabbermouth and has previously written for Kerrang! magazine in the mid-2000s. 

Thanks to the success of their debut album, 2003’s Permission To Land, The Darkness were one of the most unlikely success stories of the early 2000s – and one of the most divisive. In 2013, frontman Justin Hawkins, guitarist Dan Hawkins, bassist Frankie Poullain and original drummer Ed Graham looked back on their dizzying rise and the insanity that came with it.

Ask the members of The Darkness to pick one memory which defines that crazy period in the early 2000s when they went from hopelessly unfashionable no-marks to unlikely superstars in what seemed like 10 seconds flat, and their answer is unexpected.

It isn’t the moment when they heard that their debut album, 2003’s Permission To Land, had gone to No.1 in the UK. Nor is it the wealth and excesses that subsequently came with it. It’s not the time they picked up three Brit awards on one night. And it’s certainly not the ill-fated headline slot at the 2004 Reading Festival that effectively closed the curtain on their imperial period.

No, the thing that truly sticks in the mind of The Darkness is the very first time Justin Hawkins pulled on his catsuit, for a gig in the back room of the Castle pub in Tooting Bec, South London, on November 16, 2001.

“The catsuit was something I wanted to bring into it,” says Justin now. “My mother used to hang around with Brian Jones, and she once described an outfit he was wearing as being a pink catsuit seductively unzipped to a dangerously low area. She’d always reminisce fondly about that. So from childhood I always thought that the catsuit was part of the rock’n’roll theme.”

The rest of the band were less keen on this sartorial extravagance. “I remember having a pint with Dan [Hawkins, guitarist and younger brother of Justin] after the suit had become a regular fixture,” says drummer Ed Graham. “We were going: ‘You text him about it!’ ‘No, you text him about it!’ We both ended up texting him to say: ‘We’re not sure about these catsuits.’ His response was: ‘Fuck you, x [kiss].’”

It was an early example of both the shameless flamboyance and the bloody-minded stubbornness that would define the band in general, and their frontman in particular. Although in the case of Justin’s debut appearance in a catsuit, things didn’t exactly pan out as hoped.

“He wanted a white one but they got the material completely wrong,” laughs Dan Hawkins. “And as soon as he started sweating, it turned into a naked suit, a bit like Shakira. He had jeans on, and he started taking them off for the big reveal and realised he’d left his shoes on, and he was literally on his back while the song started. We were trying to keep it going while he was on the floor. Someone in the audience managed to prise the jeans off for him. A total fucking shambles.”

Little did the people in the audience realise what the future held for the man wriggling around on stage as his dignity took to the hills. Though it’s fair to say that half of them wouldn’t have lost sleep if they’d never seen the band again.

“That was a defining moment,” says bassist Frankie Poullain. “Some people thought we were really sad because we were playing a pub and thinking we were 70s rock stars, but then other people were coming up to say they hadn’t seen anything that entertaining in years. We divided people right from the start.”

For a year or so in the early 2000s, The Darkness were the biggest band in Britain. Permission To Land had crested the charts on its release in July 2003, a gloriously anomalous splash of colour amid the grim monochrome wasteland of the early-2000s music scene. Making no secret of their love of AC/DC, Thin Lizzy and Queen, they weren’t rock’n’roll’s future so much as a souped-up, tongue-in-cheek reboot of its past. More importantly, they brought back something that had long been missing in music: fun.

The Hawkins brothers had left their home town, the sleepy seaside enclave of Lowestoft, six years earlier. While Justin headed off to Huddersfield University, 16-year-old Dan opted to forego higher education entirely and decamped to London, where he formed a band, Empire, with French-born, Scottish-raised bassist Poullain. They were eventually joined on guitar and keyboards by Justin.

“We had a good singer, but he wasn’t right for us,” explains Dan. “At that time we were quite progressive. We’d just got into ridiculous time signatures, that I don’t think anyone could have sung on.”

Going nowhere slowly, Empire decided to call it quits. Dan became a session player, Frankie went off to become a tour guide in Venezuela, and Justin carved out a small niche for himself writing music for films and adverts (the nagging ditty for Ikea’s The Shlomp campaign was his).

Fortuitously, the brothers both returned home for Millennium Eve. It was while in Lowestoft that Justin entered a karaoke competition, performing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. He astounded his brother not only by successfully aping all of Freddie Mercury’s vocals, but also by throwing in several star jumps for good measure. That’s when Dan realised the man he was after was right under his nose. “I knew he could be the band’s singer then,” says Dan, “so I gave up trying to work with good musicians and scrabbled together a band with my brother and my best mates.”

Poullain gave up his job as a tour guide and returned to London, and they persuaded Ed Graham, an old school friend, to ditch his current band and play drums for the band they’d just christened The Darkness. But they still had an awful lot of work to do. At the turn of the decade, record labels were still trying to milk the Britpop scene, despite the fact it had long since curdled. Camden in North London had been Ground Zero during the heady days of the 90s, and A&R men continued to flock there in the hope of finding some of the old magic still hanging in the air.

So did The Darkness. In August 2000 they bagged an unofficial Saturday night residency at the Monarch, a pub-cum-venue opposite Camden Market. They would open the show for whoever was playing that night, taking the stage at 8.30pm sharp. The following April they graduated to a midweek slot, but their regular monthly Saturday night gig would be a mainstay for the band for the best part of two years.

“In the past we’ve said we wanted to do those Saturday night shows because we didn’t want to play in front of the industry, as they only came out in the week, and that we wanted to build a fan base,” says Dan. “The truth is that we played those slots because no one else would book us. But it worked for us. It wasn’t long before we were filling it out.”

Many of the songs that would end up on Permission To Land were already fully formed. I Believe In A Thing Called Love and arch power ballad Love Is Only A Feeling were featured in the set as early as their fifth gig. “In that earliest period we wrote some of our strongest songs,” says Justin. “We started working out who we were early on.”

That was more than could be said for the record labels. The band’s unapologetically retro influences were out of step with prevailing trends, while their frontman’s outrageous posturing – part Freddie Mercury, part Angus Young, part Catwoman – put as many people off as it drew in.

“We did have lots of A&R men walking out and being reprimanded by senior A&R guys,” says Poullain. “They’d literally be led out of the venue after we’d done a couple of songs, almost as if we’d played an April Fool’s joke on them.”

If the band were going to succeed, they had to make it happen themselves. Their debut EP, I Believe In A Thing Called Love, got the attention of sections of the music press when it was released in 2002 on the tiny independent label, Must Destroy!. The media attention in turn made the labels think again.

“I think we had to go to a certain level ourselves before they’d jump on board, and then everyone tried to jump on board,” says Dan.

By the spring of 2003 The Darkness had been picked up by Atlantic Records. That April they sold out the 2,000-capacity Astoria in London.

“We had this tiny bank of lights either side of the stage, which we made sure were the same colour as Queen’s,” says Dan. “The DJ from the night before had left some of his tables out and we made a riser out of them, but it was all gaffa‑taped together and wobbling like fuck. It could have gone horribly wrong. What a way to go though.”

Happily, all four members of the band made it through the gigs with limbs, and dignity, intact. Suddenly this most unfashionable of bands was in serious danger of becoming trendy.

For all their frontman’s peacocking, The Darkness had a reliably British earthiness to them. Fittingly, Permission To Land was made on the sort of budget that would barely cover the catering bill on many bigger records.

“It was all done fairly cheaply,” says Dan. “The producer, Pedro Ferreira, was my best friend, and we had our own production room, which was part of a studio in Willesden in North London. The good thing was that we could go into the main studio when it wasn’t being used.”

Unlike many bands on their first album, The Darkness eschewed the ‘in and out’ ethos, preferring to pore over their songs, piling on layers of guitars and vocals that would have done Freddie Mercury proud. But the approach had its downside. “We took so long that we ran out of money,” says Dan. “After six months we only had four or five songs done. It had all gone a bit Def Leppard.”

Scrabbling together a budget to record the rest of the songs, they relocated to Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire, where they finished off the record in seven days with the help of a sleep-deprived Pedro Ferreira. “That’s why some of it is really raw in some places and then over-produced in other places,” says Dan. “But I think we nailed it.”

By the time the record was released in July 2003, The Darkness had plenty of wind in their sails. Previous single Get Your Hands Off My Woman had given them their first Top 20 hit, and the band were building a reputation as one of the best live acts around. Even so, no one anticipated just how well the album would do – it entered the UK chart at No.2, and climbed to the No.1 within a few weeks.

With hindsight, the fact that The Darkness were so outlandish counted in their favour. Record companies were hedging their bets by signing Coldplay clones and Dido soundalikes, while nu metal had given way to the middle-of-the-road stylings of Linkin Park and Evanescence. Only a new wave of garage rock spearheaded by The Strokes and the White Stripes provided a glimmer of excitement. No one was performing star jumps, let alone rocking a catsuit.

“It was all so dull during that period, musically,” says Ed Graham. “We were an antidote to what was happening. When we supported Robbie Williams at Knebworth [on August 1-3, 2003], that’s the thing that put us in The Sun and helped us cross over. We each had a look, and there were all these girlies who had their favourite Darkness member. Obviously, my appeal was more selective.”

But not everyone embraced them. Justin Hawkins’s shriek and OTT stage antics polarised opinion like few other frontmen. The band were even viewed with suspicion by a large section of the heartland rock audience, who saw them as some sort of elaborate conceptual joke.

“It made people nervous that we were smiling and enjoying what we were doing,” says Dan. “People get uncomfortable around that. It’s as if you’re not taking it seriously, so why should they?”

“James Dean Bradfield once said we were a vaudeville band,” adds Poullain. “I thought that was quite astute. What was it Adam Ant said? ‘Ridicule is nothing to be scared of…’ And a lot of people are scared of being ridiculed. We weren’t.”

Though the band were now proper pop stars, they were still skint. When they’d supported Def Leppard at London’s Brixton Academy earlier in the year, a broke Dan Hawkins had to take three buses to get to the gig. Even then he’d had to walk the last bit of the journey. “We had a meeting with management after the album had charted, and said: ‘Is there any way we can avoid public transport? It’s starting to get a bit embarrassing. That’s when we were finally put on a wage.”

Their ship truly came in at the end of that year, when Permission To Land was well on its way to selling an eventual 1.5 million copies in the UK alone. The band went from worrying that they couldn’t afford to eat, to being able to afford to buy a house.

“I went to a cashpoint and I thought I had about ten quid left,” says Dan. “I saw something that looked like 100 there instead. I thought, God, I’m overdrawn again. Then I looked at it and saw it was 100 and a few noughts after it, and that I was in credit. It was Christmas, so the first thing I did was buy the most expensive sledge I could find for one of my friends who’d just had a kid, and went straight round his house and said: ‘Merry Christmas’. That was wild.”

Things would get a lot wilder than spontaneously purchased festive presents. As the band’s success grew, so did their consumption of booze and, in the case of certain members, other substances. Asked now if there was a specific point when the wheels came off the wagon, Dan Hawkins laughs.

“The wheels were never on,” he says. “It was always carnage. We partied on the road all the time, then I’d get home and see my friends and start the party all over again. It got to the point where I thought, “If this carries on, I might die.’ That’s when I left London and moved to the countryside.”

But amid the booze and drug-fuelled chaos, there was still work to do. With an unexpected No.1 album in the UK, Atlantic were keen to push the band Stateside. America, the label reasoned, would embrace The Darkness’s classic rock’n’roll stylings, if not their flamboyance. And so it proved – at least initially.

“The first time we went to America we couldn’t get out of the car without being recognised,” says Justin. “At one point they said it was the biggest-selling debut album in America since the Spice Girls, which is a lovely statistic – I want that on my headstone. But we were just touring and touring, and we ended up going back there with no second hit single to play to the same people, when it would have been nice to stop and concentrate on where we were heading next.”

In August 2004 The Darkness brought the Permission To Land campaign to a close with a headlining appearance at the Reading Festival. It was an under-par performance by their standards – the band looked lost on a big stage, they padded out the set with unfamiliar new songs, and even Justin seemed to have left his confidence in the backstage Winnebago. In retrospect it was the point at which things began to turn for The Darkness – their crueller critics suggested that the emperor had been found stark bollock naked in the street.

The problems at their heart truly manifested themselves on their second album, One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back. Recorded at great expense with Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker, it found the band tearing themselves apart at the seams.

“Certain narcotic-based elements exacerbated present tensions,” says Justin. “All of us changed in an unpleasant way. It was only a matter of time before we stopped communicating entirely.”

Frankie Poullain was the first victim of these tensions. The bassist was fired halfway through the sessions, and replaced by roadie Richie Edwards.

“I think I was quite abrasive,” says the bassist now. “I guess it was my job to be the one who questioned things, and I got carried away with it. There was the drinking, some of us were on the powder, some of us were just hopping from bed to bed… I guess you grow apart, don’t you?”

Ed Graham calls One Way Ticket… “the million-dollar failure”. It lacks the charm of its predecessor, and its overblown excesses certainly sound like the work of a band on a lot of cocaine, but it wasn’t the musical disaster it has been painted as. Commercially it was a different matter. Released in November 2005, it failed to dent the Top 10.

There was worse was to come. In September 2006 The Sun announced that Justin Hawkins had completed a three-month stint in rehab and was leaving The Darkness. The brief but glorious burst of fun was over.

Today, the success of Permission To Land feels like a strange dream. Not only did it turn a gloriously OTT band from Lowestoft into A-list superstars, it did so at a time when the sort of music they were playing couldn’t have been less cool. It also feels like the last time a rock band properly made an impact on the wider world. You couldn’t imagine it happening now – more’s the pity.

The Darkness reunited in 2011 after a six-year hiatus in which their respective solo projects (Dan and Ed’s Stone Gods, Justin’s Hot Leg) failed to set the world alight.

The band’s most recent album, last year’s Hot Cakes, was a fine comeback effort, even if the band were aware that it could never replicate the freakish success of their debut. “Permission still has that zeal and energy of a gang,” says Dan. “And we stopped being that gang. So it’s no wonder the records never sounded the same after that.”

“I think,” adds Justin, “if you want to be interested in what you’re doing, you have to realise how precious it is. I don’t mean the success, I mean the art of it. Because that’s what’s enjoyable – the process of it. These four men, who have nothing in common, really kicking ass together. It’s a hilarious experience.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 191, November 2013

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion. 

As they release their seventh album, And So I Watch You From Afar confirm their status as the big beasts of the post-rock world. The making of Megafauna is a tale of rattling the rafters of an old linen factory, celebrating the people and places that shaped the band, and seeing what they can get away with next, as bassist Ewan Friers reveals.

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“I feel like the band seem pretty comfortable in our own skin at the minute,” says Ewen Friers, bassist of Belfast’s prog-math-post-rockers And So I Watch You From Afar. From their origins in the small town of Portrush, Northern Ireland, the quartet have arrived at a point in their career where they played two headline sets at last August’s ArcTanGent festival. Seemingly flush with confidence, they devoted one set to performing their new album, Megafauna, in its entirety.

The shows followed the success of their first US tour in seven years, yet it appears that their exponentially growing status isn’t something they’ve actively planned or pursued.

“We’re in no massive rush to chase this or chase that,” says Friers. “What we’re really chasing is making albums that we can be really proud of, and the rest will come or not come. You need to really believe in what you’re doing – that’s the main goal.”

‘Megafauna’ means very large animals; but the album itself is an ode to the group’s two homes, Portrush and their beloved Belfast, and all the people in the ecosystem that surround and support them. The music came together during lockdown, when the band – Ewen, his brother Rory and Niall Kennedy on guitars, and drummer Chris Wee – were sequestered in their rehearsal space in a converted 18th-century linen factory.

Ewen is the newest member of the line-up, officially joining four years ago, but as Rory’s brother, he’s been involved in one capacity or another since the start. “I’ve been touring with the band from the get-go. I’ve been in the studio on all the previous records,” he says. “It gives me a unique insight.”

On previous albums, ASIWYFA have often written in the studio, but that wasn’t the approach for Megafauna. “Because it was all happening during Covid, our work environment was just the four of us completely locked down in that rehearsal space in Belfast for all those months,” says Friers.

“The four walls of our rehearsal space became the epicentre of this record; it became our little universe. Other records were a bit more conceptual, taking bigger themes, broader themes; this one was more a product of the times – it was shrunken, more focused on our friendships within the band, within our scene, within Belfast, within the north coast where we’re originally from. It’s more of a zoomed-in record in that sense.”

It’s a great showcase for the quartet’s range, from the punchy power of North Coast Megafauna and the headlong momentum of Do Mór, through to the grooves of Mother Belfast Part 2 and the reflective Years Ago. “There are moments of tranquil or dreamy sounds – it’s still And So I Watch You From Afar, after all.”

“There are going to be these experimental sounds and soundscape moments, but then when you pivot to something like Do Mór, it’s almost punk rock. I remember those sessions during lockdown: you just wanted to plug straight into the amp, crank it, and rock out with your pals.”

The title Button Days is a tribute to those moments of cutting loose and rocking out. The history of their space as a linen factory lives on in the buttons left behind in the cracks in the walls and ceilings. During rehearsals, the band discovered that whenever they really dug into their heavy side, buttons fell upon them from above.

Bands like to explore all the fun things you can do in the studio to cover up the song in its pure form

“Eventually I started putting them in an empty beer bottle,” says Friers. “Now we have this bottle full of old buttons that symbolise a day in the rehearsal and writing process. I think it’s a beautiful visual record of that time. It shows how desperate we were for entertainment during lockdown that I was preoccupied with collecting buttons. When we were naming songs, one of Rory’s suggestions was that we should pay homage to the ‘button days.’”

The recording sessions took place in Attica Audio, Donegal, working with studio owner and producer/engineer Tommy McLaughlin. “It’s an amazing residential studio out in the wilds; a really beautiful place,” says Friers.

The remoteness was integral to its appeal, allowing the band to maintain the sense of being immersed in the music, free from distractions, that they’d experienced in rehearsals. “That was very attractive: ‘Let’s get out of Belfast now that we’ve composed the record and we’ll lock down in this beautiful, rural setting.’”

The band trusted McLaughlin to understand the vibe they were after and to bring out the best. Although the album features appearances from The Arco String Quartet and pianist Michael Kenney, ASIWYFA wanted to maintain a live approach. “Bands get in studios, and they like to explore all the fun things you can do in the studio to cover up the song in its pure form,” says Friers.

I kept telling myself that if there’s a festival that’s going to be friendly to us, it’s ArcTanGent

“Tommy was excellent in being able to take our vision – what we talked about in the rehearsal room and wanted to print onto an album – and pull that out of us. It was very much performance based. His space is much more luxurious than our little beat-up rehearsal room, but it felt like home for sure.”

The other place that feels like home is ArcTanGent, which made it the perfect location to debut Megafauna. Friers says he felt “enormous nerves” at the prospect of playing an entire set of unfamiliar material to a festival crowd. “But I kept on telling myself that if there’s a festival that’s going to be friendly to us, it’s ArcTanGent. We could be called the house band for that festival.

“I think And So I Watch You From Afar have played it more times than anyone. It’s the epicentre of the scene we inhabit; so there was pressure, but honestly it felt like we were going to play the album through for our friends and family at the rehearsal room.”

Playing Megafauna might have been a gamble, but the cards fell in the band’s favour. “There still were proper moshpits, and even during the really quiet moments the audience was so respectful,. As I was leaving the stage, I put my arm around Niall and said, ‘I think we got away with it.’ That’s the best way I can describe it: we got away with it.”

ASIWYFA have been getting away with it for almost 20 years, taking their ambitious, dense instrumental rock far beyond their birthplace in Northern Ireland. If there’s a glass ceiling for bands of this progressive stripe, it seems they haven’t hit it yet – although when they started, just getting out of Portrush was the height of their ambitions.

“Imagine getting a gig in Belfast; that was the glass ceiling of where we could go,” says Friers. “Then, bit by bit, there have been more glass ceilings. I think we’ve been surprised about where the band can go and what it can do.

“I don’t think we have an unhealthy chasing of that, like, ‘How do we break through?’ I don’t think that’s what gets us out of bed in the morning, but there’s an optimistic thing in me, like, ‘Why not?’ I think it’s important to be ambitious. I’m coming back to what I said to Niall: ‘Let’s see what we can get away with.’”

After starting his writing career covering the unforgiving world of MMA, David moved into music journalism at Rhythm magazine, interviewing legends of the drum kit including Ginger Baker and Neil Peart. A regular contributor to Prog, he’s written for Metal Hammer, The Blues, Country Music Magazine and more. The author of Chasing Dragons: An Introduction To The Martial Arts Film, David shares his thoughts on kung fu movies in essays and videos for 88 Films, Arrow Films, and Eureka Entertainment. He firmly believes Steely Dan’s Reelin’ In The Years is the tuniest tune ever tuned.