With their new album ‘Verkligheten’ in their backpockets Soilwork is doing some festivals this summer with Alcatraz as one of their stops. Time to catch up with Bjorn, Sylvain and Sebastian for a nice chat after their overwhelming appearance on the Swamp stage . Check it out what they had to tell us.

GRIMM: How have the responses been so far for the new album?

Bjorn : It has been really good. We know we got something good in our hands, though the responses are overwhelming, we never expected this. With The Living Infinite and The Ride Majestic we thought we got our grand opus , sadly they were never picked up by the audience as it should be and got a bit left under the radar. Really I don’t know why, maybe it’s because people are becoming more interested in us again , they started picking us up again.

GRIMM: With a backlog as big as Soilwork‘s it must not be an easy task to choose which songs you will play live. How do you decide which ones makes it on the setlist?

Sylvain : No, it’s not easy. Now we are playing a lot of new material which is of course normal with that album. We have a lot of good songs that we are willing to play. For me personally I would love to each time play other songs.

Bjorn : Well you know, before we were always ending with Stabbing The Drama, now we are ending our set with one from the latest album and the reactions are overwhelming. This shows also where we are with the band at the moment

Sylvain : It is quite refreshing to switch songs around like that in your setlist and also a luxury to be able to do it.

GRIMM: Each album that Soilwork delivers, sounds different but still has this typical sound. How do you make it still challenging for yourselves while keeping the overall typical sound?

Bjorn : Well, we do have inspirations from ourselves and the stuff that happens in our lives. We have some nostalgic touches but we were and will never be the band that will say, “hey let’s do another Natural Born Chaos” for example. We know that there has also been line up changes and that has also been good for the band, it helps to keeps thing refreshing in our creative processes. Everybody focuses on the original line-up , they did amazing things, they laid the base for our sound, that’s true but we keep evolving as band. I think we can call ourselves lucky as the line-up changes in our band has been quite successful in contrary to other bands that has been through the process of line-up changes.

As I am the only founding member of Soilwork it’s of course different for me to work as before. I grew up with the other guys, I was 16-17 years old when we started this journey. It has been fun , sometimes a walky ride and other times you just want to quit for 100 % where you have the feeling, fuck this I don’t want to this anymore.  That’s life you know, it’s only natural that the sounds changes when you get older while keeping some old touches, also with the help of the new members for who I have a lot of appreciation.

GRIMM: Could you tell us what you find interesting these days to listen to?

Sylvain : The one I listen I a lot to is Plini, all instrumental, still young but what a beautiful player he is. And for the rest is it just random stuff on Spotify, sometimes good, sometimes less good. There is such an amount of good music to listen to today

Sebastian : For me it is quite different, I listen to a lot of black metal stuff, Dark Funeral and so. I’m more into the Norwegian black metal scene. There is this one band , The Midnight, a Danish artist I think, you have to check out, it is more a groovy synth wave with a lot of 80’s feel. It’s relaxing.

Bjorn : I also like Idle Hands, a more Sisters Of Mercy mixed with late Ramones. Every track sounds like a soundtrack to the Stephen King movie Pet Cemetary.

GRIMM: Thx for the nice little chat , it was a pleasure to talk with you and have fun on the next tours.

Sylvain : Thx man, it was nice talking, see you later.