THORNS INTERVIEW
(ONLINE EXCERPT)
It is no exaggeration to state that Thorns, and its central protagonist Snorre Ruch, was one of the more significant influences in shaping black metal as we know it today. The approach to both guitar playing and composition on the early Thorns demo and rehearsal tapes – such as Grymyrk – would have an incomparable impact upon the early 1990s Norwegian scene in particular, inspiring Euronymous to such an extent that entire riffs were used on De Mysteriis Dom. Sathanas and Snorre was enlisted as a guitar player in Mayhem.
It would, however, take some years until the band capitalised on this potential and finally appeared on a medium other than dubbed cassette. Thorns returned to much excitement in the black metal scene thanks to their half of the 1999 split album Thorns Vs. Emperor, this being followed less than two years later by the self-titled full-length album, issued to wide acclaim. Both saw Snorre, now joined by the likes of Satyr, Hellhammer and Aldrahn, resurrecting the bleak, visceral and angular sound of the band’s early days and presenting it in a less archaic and more industrially-tinged form.
What we didn’t know at that time was that this was essentially the last we would hear from Thorns for almost a quarter of a century, Snorre only remaining visible through occasional work with bands such as Satyricon, Slagmaur and The Deathtrip. But now, finally, comes a long-overdue return. Rumours of a follow-up album have been circulating for many years – indeed, it’s been over a decade since we first heard a small preview of the new material – but now we are assured that this much-awaited sophomore record is finally approaching release. And we can report that it is sounding extremely potent, even in unmastered form.
So it was that over a couple of hours on video call, we discussed not one, but two new Thorns albums, as well as the official Thorns merchandise that Cult Never Dies is releasing (again after many years discussion and speculation!). Note: this excerpt is part of a much bigger(!) interview, which will be released in print at some point in the future.
Cult Never Dies: Let’s start with the subject everyone is curious about, namely the second Thorns album. Obviously, a lot of people are curious as to how it will sound, particularly when compared to previous works, and specifically your only other full-length.
Snorre Ruch: “I think the songs are better this time. It’s still varied; it has some shorter, kind of sucker punchy songs, but it still has those really fast, aggressive tracks. I think the first album could have been better, but with this one, I feel it is a package that, when you have listened to it, you feel you’ve been on a very good journey. And I think the big difference maybe is the production, that it will sound more wholesome, with proper bass, and I hope the vocals even will be better.”
So, the vocals are still being recorded?
“I think I’m 95% finished with the vocal work on the album. I just had two… it’s wrong to say ‘old women’ because they’re in their late 60s or early 70s, and women get a little offended if you comment on their age. But that was kind of the point because I needed a choir for one song, just a short passage. So I talked to two local ladies that sing in a local choir, and they agreed to do kind of ‘scranty’ vocals, you know, not perfect, so it’s exactly what I wanted. It’s like a local, small-time choir with old women that don’t know how to sing perfectly [laughs]. It’s supposed to be a little shaky, that was not the point, so they nailed it. So I got that done, and I’ve been listening to my own vocal takes, and I’m thinking I can do some retakes of some parts, but I’m not the best judge of that. So I’ll take all the mix-downs of both my vocal takes and Björn’s [Aldrahn] vocal takes and send them off to Sigurd – Satyr – and my guy in Oslo, Erik Ljunggren [Satyricon, Seigmen]. They’ll have a listen to it and comment if I should do some more or if we can consider it done, and then I upload the files to Eric’s server, and he tidies up the projects and prepares them for Mike Hartung, which we suppose will do the mixing of the album. So I hope to get it off my table soon, so I can start the other ten projects that are going in my mind, [such as] the follow-up Thorns album pre-prod…”
…You’ve started the third album already?
“Yeah, I had a rule for myself that I shouldn’t touch anything before the [second] Thorns album is finished, but you get ‘blind’, and I needed to switch my attention a little, to not get crazy from it. So I kind of started the process of the third album. I had some leftover sketches for the second album, which are cool, and I want to develop those into more complete songs. I have old Cubase mixdowns, and I could reinstall Cubase and continue working on them, but I’d rather use the mixdowns, put them into Pro Tools and start from there, because they are only programmed drums and guitars, so I’ll replace the drums with something simple. A synthesiser bass drum and a clap and maybe some hi-hat, re-record the riffs and start arranging it a little, and then I send it off to Kenneth [Kapstad], who is the drummer, and Trond [Frønes] who is the bass player and Björn to pre-prod on it, test stuff.”
How far along is this third album then?
“I have six or seven tracks for that. It’s kind of aggressive… it’s dark and has some mid-tempo parts and something heavy as well, but most of these tracks for album three are more moody and heavy. I want to try and bring back some of the gloomy feel to it, let things be atmospheric and moody and use a lot of guitar/bass interaction, because now it feels it’s more like ordinary, thrash, death, black metal.”
On the second album you mean?
“Yes. What should I say? It’s high-paced and aggressive and all that, but I want to... do something more rugged and more... Grymrk-ish . So, we bring back the bass lines and the moody guitar parts. I guess I can’t avoid putting some grim synthesizer on it as well.”
And the ambition with the third album is to make it quick, right?
“To be quicker anyway. Because it drives me crazy.”
Let’s talk about that, because this is probably the longest wait for a black metal album since Mysticum’s Planet Satan. In fact, it’s possibly the longest gestating album in the album in the history of the genre. Can we discuss why this second album has taken so long to come out, and when you actually started work on it?
“There are many reasons, and it’s kind of embarrassing to say that we started on it almost immediately after the first one. All the songs and arrangements were finished, the basics for them at least, before 2008. So, we recorded the drums, guitars, and first bass takes in 2008. And then, life happened too much, and there were some issues with the recording.”
Technical problems?
“A big one was that we wanted to have a really big drum sound, so we detuned the drums, which were big drums… I don’t know if they’re more jazz drums, but the main problem was with the kick drums; the shells were so loose that they were moving in space. So, the hits on the shells differed in time because of their [changing] position. It took me many years actually to go through the nightmare of editing the kick drums so that they were more or less in sync, because all the time these shells were moving back and forth because there was a lot of slack.”
Could you not have just re-recorded the drums? Would that not have been quicker?
“We could have done that, but you know, when you first start doing something, and it works, you want to think, ‘Okay, this can be saved,’ and you don’t look ahead on all the work hours [it takes] to get everything complete. I actually outsourced it a couple of times to other people, and it came back too perfect. It came back too… what do you call it? Too ‘on the grid’. And I wanted to have a natural feel to it. Even though it was edited, I wanted to not move the hit to 100%, but maybe 60%. And when you have the amount of kick drum hits on an album, and you have to step back and listen to what you’ve done, and it feels like, ‘Okay, I’ve done this good, but it may be a little bit too good,’ and you go back and like, ‘Okay, go a little back to the original and do it a little softer.’ So, yeah, we’ve done a lot of stupid things during that. The first thing was not listening to Sigurd. When we told him about the bass drum tuning, he was like, ‘This could be problematic, Snorre.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I hear you say that, but we want to try.’ And it ended up a couple of years in editing because I haven’t had time, or energy, or spirit, to sit with the editing all the time.”
I understand from conversations I’ve had with you and some of your collaborators in the past that there was also quite a lot of rewriting going on?
“When we were finished with the drums and the guitars, and everything was all good together, I listened to the album as a whole. And I was thinking, ‘Shit, it’s a little flat.’ It’s the dynamics in the music; it’s too tense. I got tired from listening to all the tracks. It was a good journey with good songs, but you sit there, and you’re like, ‘Ah, this is a bit too much,’ because it had high intensity on very many songs, and on very many parts. The main rhythm figure we use are triplets – like bam, bam, bam– and I sat down with Sigurd and listened through it, and I told him about my problem with it, and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s no strange thing at all, it’s [this intensity] all the time.’”
“So I was like, ‘Okay, we have to break it up a little, we have to take out some drum parts maybe, replace them with something else that’s not that intense,’ because I wanted more dynamics, and I proposed to Sigurd that we pull in someone external, someone who had a good musical air but was not that into metal that they would swallow all that intensity without questioning it. So that’s why Erik Ljunggren was taken into the project, I was like, ‘Okay, can you take these songs and make them breathe a little more?’ And he did.”
Since part of this interview is for the homepage, let’s talk about the new shirts. We’ve marked Thorns return with some long-overdue official merchandise, and obviously, that meant digging into the past as we were going through your lyrics together, and we even used one of your own drawings from the mid-90s for one design. How do you feel reconnecting with things like that? Is that a pleasant, nostalgic thing, or is it difficult? What’s your relationship to your musical history generally?
“I get a little nostalgic from listening to early Slayer records, and when I do the dishes or vacuum the floor, I can listen to SOD and stuff that. Apart from that, I don’t spend much time looking back into the history of music or anything like that. And I’m not too nostalgic concerning other things in life either. I’m trying to keep my life together here and now and look forward. When people are talking about old records, or old parties, or wanting to check out the old record stores, I’m totally uninterested. So [for the shirts] I was like, ‘Okay, if this is going to happen at all, I’m not going to pick it apart and make it into something completely different.’ I would leave it more to you to take the decisions, because if not, it would become a skateboard T-shirt, or a uniform, or something completely different. There are a lot of good comments on the design, and I’ve told people about it, and they were like, ‘Yeah, I’ll totally wear that. I’ll totally wear a T-shirt that looks this,’ and I’m like, okay, cool. I’m not sure if I would do that, but whatever. I think it’s fun that I never had a t-shirt out before… actually we had just one, by a company called Shirts and Destroy in the USA. They made a Thorns T-shirt once that was kind of radical, with a lot of design in the front and, I think, a new version of a new logo. But I don’t think it was distributed in the channels where metal people usually pick up shirts.”
I’ve seen some other designs in the past. There’s one with the album cover and the word ‘discipline’ on the back for example. I don’t know if that was official or…
“No, no, it wasn’t. I wasn’t involved with anything, except that Shirts and Destroy shirt.”
Oh, interesting - did Moonfog not do one?”
“No. Yeah, wait, I think there was a small release from Moonfog with, if I remember right, a different logo, the same logo used on Thorns vs Emperor maybe?”
This is the debut album shirt I’ve seen a few times before [shows Snorre a picture on the phone of the ‘Discipline’ shirt], which I assumed was...
“No.”
That’s not official?
“No.”
Speaking of your debut album, your 2001 opus is still generally described as an industrial black metal album. I remember we’ve spoken in the past, and you’ve said that this was not intentional and that you almost regret some aspects of that.
“Yeah, I think there are more reasons for it. One is that it was loop-recorded in Cubase, and then I added a lot of samples, and I guess there’s a good deal of synthesisers there, and the bass is a synthesiser and stuff like that, and the drums are very strict and the sound is very… I feel it’s a little tiny. It’s not so full as I would like. So I understand that people say it’s industrial, but I think now even though it’s not industrial in the same way, people will still feel it has some of the same vibe because we still use synthesisers, even though they’re analogue, and the package is really hard and hammering still. So I can see it coming that people will say it’s still industrial.”
Do you see it as industrial? When you were making the album, did you have that in mind?
“No, not really. And my first thought was to get rid of all the synthesisers and have a real bass and fuller sound and all that, but it still feels like [a continuation] from the previous album. There are some sounds there that feel a little alien – like not typical metal sounds – but I think we blend it in a really nice way.”
So you see it as a continuation from the first album despite the long hiatus?
“It will be a level up from that one. It will be much, much, much better sounding and I hope that it will be raw as well. I think we’ll make people happy even if they like the industrialness of the previous album, or if people are more into harsh, hard shit, it will still be that, and I think it will be broader sounding. I don’t think people will get too disappointed.”
