AMARANTHE // Maximum Metal Cocktail

There are some mediums that simply should not work when mixed – with death metal, pop and techno among your most unlikely allies.

To contemplate mixing the three is almost laughable, but to have the faith and confidence in your ability to actually try it takes something special, and to be able to pull it off over a number of albums is akin to musical wizardry.

Amaranthe, from Sweden, have just released their fourth full length album, Maximalism, with a three pronged vocal attack complete with clean vocals and death metal growls to go with their eclectic genre mash striking a chord in their native country and finally spreading to the rest of the world on the back of previous single Drop Dead Cynical and album Massive Addictive which managed to crack the American market as well as charting in six countries.

Vocalist Elize Ryd admits that even the band members have difficulty in categorising a sound which is so unique it is difficult to even compare the band to any of their peers.

“There’s so much I could give you,” she laughed when posed with the question. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot and trying to come up with a perfect word for this genre because I have heard a few other bands who I could almost fit into a similar box but I haven’t come up with anything yet! It’s like… I would say metal in the bottom, like a cake layer, and then we put some electronic elements in there then some pop and then death metal. Even blues is something that we put onto Maximalism and we have never had that sort of blues type inspiration before. It’s a bit of everything; I don’t know what to think (laughs).”

After forming in 2008, Amaranthe took three years to release their self-titled debut album, but since then have stepped up the pace with the recently released Maximalism being their fourth.

“It’s weird when you say it like that,” Ryd laughed again. “It’s been going very fast and we are kind of shocked still ourselves! We don’t know if it’s going to continue like this and in the end we are going to have twenty albums out (laughs) but I guess because it’s very easy for people to find music these days through different kinds of media like Spotify or YouTube or iTunes you want to be putting out new material faster. It’s the listeners who get used to having new music all the time, not like back in the day, so you have to try to keep up.”

While hoping Maximalism continues to break down international barriers, Ryd admits that convincing new listeners to gravitate towards the band can be difficult, especially when confronted by the challenge of encouraging them to listen for the first time.

Amaranthe are not a band which translates well on paper but equally Ryd is convinced that once people get past the outer shell the music is strong enough to elicit repeat listening.

“On Maximalism we used some different elements,” she explained. “That’s kind of been our thing from the start and yes, you’re right, maybe no-one thought about mixing these styles of music before but it has been our style since the beginning. When we started one person was saying ‘I want to do this’ and another person added their style and it grew from there. We mixed all of what we wanted together and it sounded pretty cool (laughs). All three of our previous albums have been pretty much… say I had sherbet and sugar. The previous album was mixed equally and with this one we decided to make it more diverse by adding more sugar until it was our concoction and we added a few other spices. We made a conscious decision to write an album which was much more diverse than the previous one and I think we did that.”

“We wanted to make the songs stand out a bit more from the other albums. For us we think it’s more organic and that was our goal. We wanted to have it sound more like what we do live.”

Having already toured through the USA, Europe and Japan,  Amaranthe now have Australia on their radar, with Ryd hoping they can finally bring their hybrid music to our shores.

“No, we’ve never been there,” she said with a hint of regret in her voice. “That is definitely one of the places we really want to go to. We are making plans and we have been for the last four years (laughs). I really do hope we can come there on this album.”

Maximalism is out now through Nuclear Blast Entertainment.