Come on in for some previously unpublished interview snippets from our world exclusive interview with black metal royalty Watain on the eve of their tenth anniversary.

By 1998 when Watain started, so much had gone before in the world of black metal, and there’s a difference between feeding off what had gone before and actually giving something back. When did you realise that you could give something back to black metal and also when did you start to get a belief system in place?

Erik Danielsson: “It’s hard to name one specific point where we realised that we had more to give than what had happened before, but I think it’s a thing that grows on you, and especially when you get to know your artistic side and when you get to know the potency and value of what you’re doing. That’s something that grows on you because every band that’s working hard will realise that even though you know they might have a great fuel and a great starting point of view, it is always something that grows on you that you eventually realise what kind of potential it has. So I’d say it’s a thing that has happened in natural steps for us, but now we’re definitely there, and now I definitely feel that when so many bands are, within black metal or not, have a narrow-minded point of view or they’re a bit too shy about – not exploring new ground, because I think the groundlines have already been drawn already, the blueprint is there, but the thing is that people considered the blueprint as the roof which you cannot go beyond, and for us what Mayhem did was something great to build out from, not just something to live up to, and that is what is lacking. This revolutionary aspect of black metal that happened in the first and second wave of it has sort of gotten lost. It’s never made any sense to me.”

How much is the stench of the animal blood onstage an act of confrontation, and how is important is that to Watain?
Erik: “That’s one aspect of our ‘controversial’ side, that I know that whoever visits a Watain concert, whether they like it or not, they <i>will</i> have an opinion about it. It’s like asking someone what they think about Greenpeace, and they could say that it doesn’t mean anything to them, but if you ask them about an organisation like Al-Quaida, even if they are good or bad, I don’t care, but people will certainly have an opinion because the viewpoint of what they do is so controversial. That makes people think, it wakes them up, and that is the first step towards anything, be it enlightenment or the further blinding of the soul, but people might as well just shut off everything and deny what they have seen, but at least they are doing that. They cannot deny that they have been confronted with something that is very powerful.”

You’ve all got your ‘Black Metal Militia’ uniform, and there’s a real sense that this is an army. For all the band members to go through what you go through, to live in this world you’ve created, how strong is the bond within the band.
Erik: “This is one of the main foundations of Watain, and also a thing that I don’t see in many other bands. We have such a strong unity that I consider us more a brotherhood than a band, linked spiritually, and of course this is valued above most things in Watain. It’s also the reason why we can look so confident on the 10 years, that we all the share the same goals and want to do the same things. We are all on the same path.”

Do you all have a shared belief system?
Erik: “Yeah, I mean we have never had one argument about where anyone stands or the actions of anyone in the band. Everyone can relate to the other one’s ways of acting and thinking at all times. To me I think that is a must in order to do something as intimate and personal as music. I could not work with people that I knew didn’t understand, not just what I was tyring to say but when you actually have four other people that know exactly what I mean at all times, that is when the chemistry is right, and that is when the magic really happens.”

The Casus Luciferi album was a great step forward. You’ve never descended into noise, you’ve always written songs and it transmits something. You’ve never wanted to be underground for the sake of it.
Erik: “No, we realised pretty early that rules, wherever they exist, are meant to be broken, and especially in such a small-minded environment that the underground became during the time that we were active in it. I mean, we still are to a certain extent, but there’s a difference between the underground that happened when we grew up in the 90s and the one now, which is pretty much just an internet thing. So to me there’s really a major difference between these two things, and I’m extremely grateful having had a chance to grow up in such an exotic environment where things were still hard to come by and it was still a lot about real artistic ideas that were traded between similar-minded people, but when the internet came and the underground moved into there instead, it lost all the parts that I liked about it. I didn’t see any reason to remain active in the underground just to get acknowledged by certain people.”

The underground can be very rigid in what it considers to be ‘true’.
Erik: “And that doesn’t really work for a band like us. We have no restrictions or limitations because we have eliminated all of them. We dislike such things. I still appreciate the small fracture of the underground that is doing something productive, and that is where new things are still boiling and being done, but I see that happen less and less. To me, it’s just a pattern of repetition, just like it is in the commercial realms of heavy metal. They’re doing just the same thing, but on a smaller scale. All the exotic feel to it is gone. My mother can find out about any 80s German demo thrash metal band if she wants to, she just has to search on Google. The hard-to-come-by feel of it was one of the more important things for me, and that’s what created this brotherly vibe and this sense that you were really a part of something intense and fiery.”

Everyone talks about the early days of BM being impossible to recreate. But did having a distance from the Norwegian scene give you a liberty to make of it what you would?
Erik: “Yeah, I think that many of those bands live on the fact that they’re Norwegian. I would be very uncomfortable in that situation because as an artist is limited by something like nationality or cultural heritage then I lose my interest. Artistry should be completely unbound by any such thing. I haven’t paid much attention to the Norwegian scene in the past years, but the glimpses that I’ve seen are just proof of what I’ve just said. It’s very much about repetition. OK, they had something great and they have something great in their heritage that is worth to acknowledge of course, and to build out from, but on the other hand, I don’t see anyone building, I see people repeating and polishing. They already reached their peak. I cannot speak for every Norwegian band, but I can say myself that I would feel very uncomfortable if I had such a thing I had to acknowledge all the time. And like you said, being from Sweden perhaps makes it a bit easier to be a bit more creative in all aspects.”

You don’t have that baggage with you. In Sweden you also had Dissection and apart from sharing a member, there seemed to be a real bond between the two bands. What did Dissection mean to Watain?
Erik: “From the beginning everyone who we grew up Dissection together with, Mayhem and Marduk around that time as well, and a few other bands, they were the greatest bands from the North, the ones that really took things to the extremes and did things the way that you wanted them to be done. So we all had a huge admiration for them in the first place and a great respect for them, and when we got acquainted, and when Jon came out, it felt like a very natural step that these two bands would, somewhere along the way, bond, because we shared so much of their beliefs and so much of their ideas about why even to make music in the first place that it couldn’t be avoided in a way. So now I can definitely say that it is the band that we’ve related the most to and that we’ve felt most comfortable in the presence of, definitely.”

After 10 years, you’ve only done three albums. Watain albums are rare events. Is it a long process, is it just waiting for the right moment for inspiration to strike?
Erik: “Yeah, the basic thing is that we just never pushed an album to happen, and I think we’ve done very well with not doing that, because I’ve seen bands rushing stuff together and I know how wrong it can be. Even though I feel that we have 1,000 ideas and we could probably write two albums in a month, we have no reason to. We don’t feel that kind of rush. It happens when it happens. I never liked the music industry way of doing things in the first place, and I don’t see any reason for adapting to it other than wanting to earn a lot of money, then I can just as well do something else. The last thing I want to do is to drag Watain into the dirt by producing some fast food music.”

When you do make an album, is there a certain atmosphere you need to create around you in the studio?
Erik: “Yeah, absolutely. I think it definitely helps to adapt your environment to what you’re going to do. I cannot write an album in this room, you know? We had a really good thing with that because we have this Necromorbus studio and that’s the great thing because Torre the producer always gives us complete freedom to rearrange things in the studio and bring our own stuff to make it our home, because we always stay there for all the time we record, like a month or two months. We never leave the place. That’s a must for me, because the studio is such a sterile environment in the first place. I loathe it, to be honest, but you can make certain adjustments and it’s all good.”

Check out the original Watain feature!