METAL HELL: How do you rate THRESHOLD?

OSCAR DRONJAK: I think THRESHOLD is a very natural progression from Chapter V: Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. It’s something that came along nicely from the beginning as far as improving on the stuff we did before. I’m very happy with how everything turned out.

MH: What inspired some of the lyrics?

OD: The lyrics are more varied than we’ve done before I think, in terms of content. Some of the lyrics are more fantasy based. The song “Rebel Inside” for example is about the spread of heavy metal in the 80’s & the 90’s & a song like “The Fire Burns Forever” is about being on top & then being on the opposite, in the gutter & then coming back up again. “Natural High” is about vampires.

MH: With “Rebel Inside”, and metal in the 80’s, how would you compare that to now?

OD: In the 80’s people outside of the metal community didn’t understand what people were doing, they just saw long hair & metal t-shirts so you had to constantly explain yourself. In the 90’s the explaining had to be done through people within the metal community who should know better & we had to explain why would we play heavy metal now when grunge & whatever else (was big). We were trying to prove to people why we do what we do & I don’t think that should be necessary, especially not from people within the metal community, they definitely know better.

When I wrote that song I had all these pent up aggressions towards the bias of a lot of other people.

MH: What sort of guitar set up did you record with on this album?

OD: We have Engl amps & Jackson guitars, which we’ve used for a couple of years.

MH: Do you still experiment with new tones?

OD: We always experiment. I’m a guitar player myself so I take great interest in getting a good sound & since Hammerfall is a very guitar based band it’s very important that we do that. From my point of view I think this is an exciting part of recording, is a bigger sound & hearing the stuff you’re gonna record with the sound that you will end up with. We take a lot of interest in that.

MH: With this album were you going for more of a live in the studio sound?

OD: Yeah, what we tried to do was get an overall production on the album that simulated a live show from Hammerfall, with the energy & the intensity of a live show. We’ve tried that before but we’ve never succeeded as good as we did this time.

MH: Do you write your solos beforehand?

OD: Not before we enter the studio. Usually very few solos are written by that point, what we do is sit down wherever we are with the guitar & just write the solos the night before we record them. Sometimes there’s a little improvising going on but it’s not much. The improvising takes place before.  Let’s put it that way.

MH: Do you keep your solos the same live as they’re recorded?

OD: I think they should be played the way they are on the album cause it’s an important part of the song. If I go to a show & I’ve listened to a song 200 times, which is not unusual when you’re a metal fan you wanna hear the solos the way they sound in your head. That’s what we try to do.

MH: Do you see a correlation between horror movies & metal music?

OD: I think maybe the tongue in cheek thing of it all, that we know this is not real but we’re trying to have fun with it, maybe that part of the horror aspect. I’m not a big horror fan. I like a few (horror) movies. The good stuff from the 70’s like The Exorcist & The Omen movies, they are brilliant & some of the new stuff like Saw & The Grudge is really good.