Peter: It’s been awesome! It’s almost ended, like two more shows to go, we’ve done thirty-one shows now. For being the opening band, it’s been really good to us; people showing up early, we had good crowds, it’s been awesome. It makes us want to go back for sure and hopefully play a little bit longer set; that’d be cool.

Peter: Yeah, it is, it’s short and since we have four records out it’s kind of hard to choose which songs, you know; we want to play more songs, of course. But this is like a promotion tour for us, I guess, and we’re just happy with the situation as it is.

Peter: About ten songs.

Christofer: And the songs we play every night, like the songs we did videos for.

Peter: Like “Secondary Effects” and “Convicted” we play, of course. It’s about ten songs, give or take.

Peter: I wouldn’t say there were disappointments, no; I mean, we’re in the U.S., so that’s cool enough for us. It’s been up and down, some shows more people show up and it’s different all the time. There’s been some highs, too, of course, like when it’s really crowded. Like yesterday, for example, it was a small venue, but it was totally packed, the place was cooking.

Christofer: Orangevale.

Peter: It fit like maybe four hundred people, but it was packed.

Peter: Yeah, exactly. But for the band, that’s cool, but being in the audience like that for a whole evening, it’s weird. It’s not cool. But for us it’s cool. (laughs)

Christofer: I wouldn’t be able to be in the audience for a whole night.

Peter: From the latest one, “Layers of Lies”, actually we just found a picture on the internet and a friend of mine told us that we needed to check out this guy and so we did and we found this picture because we didn’t have any ideas. Before, most of it we had ideas for. It’s always different; like “Expanding Senses” was more like a white kind of thing, but too bad for us, In Flames did a white cover and Soilwork, too at the same era, but I think we want to keep it original in a way, but also whatever kind of horror style goes with it.

Peter: It’s great that those bands made it, you know and it’s great for us that different bands make it and for us that is good, because those bands, they have fans that get into our kind of music. But I wouldn’t say that if they make it and we don’t… it’s no hard feelings for us. We just kept true to our kind of style and whatever we do and if people like it, that’s cool, and if they don’t, we do our music anyway, so I wouldn’t say we’d change anything for commercial purposes.

Peter: Yeah, I know.

Peter: (laughs a little) Quite a few bands do, you know. I don’t actually think people do music that they don’t like. You might listen to other bands, I know that here on the bus, there’s everything from very soft music to Cannibal Corpse, so I know people are listening to other kinds of music, too; you can be inspired by that. People might get bored playing metal or whatever and want to change their styles, but I think that “sellout” is kind of a weird word, too. Sellout would be like if you sold platinum records, but “sellout” and you sell a hundred thousand records? If you don’t make a living off of it anyway, I wouldn’t say it’s a sellout.

Christofer: Actually, Lawrence was never in the band. We formed Darkane and tried to find a vocalist and we didn’t, but we had booked the studio time and we asked Daniel Bergstrand, who was the producer, because the studio was a six hour drive from us. He told us that his assistant was very good, so we said “okay, let’s use him.”

Peter: We heard one scream, actually, with his band Force Feed.

Christofer: We said, “can you scream like that on the whole album? Okay, you’re in.” And he said okay, but when we arrived to the studio, he said “yeah, I’m going to do this album with you, but I’d prefer you keep searching for another vocalist” because he had his band, Force Feed, and he didn’t want to leave that band. So we kept searching and after awhile, we found Andreas in our own hometown. We had known him awhile before, but we had never thought of him as a metal guy; he’s more of a Whitesnake vocalist. (laughter)

Peter: He was into hard rock and stuff like that, but we had to teach him to scream.

Peter: I don’t think (they’re different) thematically, because we don’t do concept albums, but the concept is kind of darker sorts of lyrics, of course. But “Layers of Lies” is definitely inspired by “The Matrix” and different layers, like if you take the blue pill, you will see the real reality, you take the red pill, you go back to your cocoon or whatever fantasy reality. And “Layers of Lies”, I think there might be different layers, like if you wake up from this reality there might be another reality, so that was the layers of lies. “Layers of Lies” could also be society, the world, politicians; all the lies that go on and stuff like that. But thematically from “Expanding Senses”, Christofer came up with that title and it was just like a brainstorming thing, sounds cool…

Christofer: Yeah, sounds interesting on an album. It also had to do with the album cover, with people with their heads buried in walls; they could only breathe and eat with their mouth and everything else was in concrete and they probably would have expanded some senses before they died in that situation.

Peter: “Layers of Lies” pretty much goes with all the lyrics on the album because you can interpret it how you want to; if you like the “Matrix” theme or social lyrics like “Mission Degradation” is also kind of layers of lies, some people living on the street, some people have lots of money, most likely people got that from… not always the good ways.

Christofer: We wanted to call the album “Slayers of Flies” in the beginning… (laughter)

Jorgen (bass): We would never do a tour with Soilwork. (hearty laughter)

Christofer: There have been so many rumors about tours, so I don’t even remember that one. We have been asked to do tours there and there, read about it on forums; “oh, we’re going on tour with Nevermore!”, but as long as we’re not involved, we don’t care.

Christofer: Cool. I wanted to play with other musicians ‘cause I’ve been playing together with these guys all my life almost, nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to “expand my senses” (laughter) and Peter had been in, and Klaus also has been in so many side projects that I thought, “I’m not in a side project, so I should start my own.” So I asked Peter to sing on it and I asked Gustaf Hielm, bass player from Meshuggah, to play the bass and Ryan Van Poederooyen, who plays the drums in The Devin Townsend Band to play the drums and they all agreed. I wrote the whole album because I wanted to see what an album totally written by myself would sound like, we recorded it and got signed to Listenable Records in France. It’s just out, I think you can order it via The End Records right now. We’ve gotten quite a lot of good reviews so far. If you like death metal with double bass drums and a bit more instrumental, some technical parts and a little more guitar solos than the usual, you should check it out.

Christofer & Peter: Thank you!