Draconian: Rising From Ruin
Gothic death doom veterans DRACONIAN have just unleashed their epic new album In Somnolent Ruin, which marks the return of vocalist Lisa Johansson to the band. A darkly cinematic opus that proves DRACONIAN are still a group fizzing with ideas, we caught up with drummer Daniel Johansson to discuss the creative process behind the record.
We started by asking about how it has been having their original vocalist rejoin the group and how this had impacted on the writing process for In Somnolent Ruin. “The whole process has actually felt really natural,” begins Daniel. “Lisa has just fit right back in with all of us and we have extremely good chemistry now within the band. Everyone really feels at ease, which hasn’t always necessarily been the case previously, but now it feels like everybody has got into position for the new record really well. It felt like a really natural progression with her rejoining.”
Lisa’s vocal performance is a real highlight of the album, providing a beautiful, ethereal counterpoint to the brutal death growls of Anders Jacobsson. As with a lot of gothic doom, though, a record often either lives or dies based on its production and the sound quality on In Somnolent Ruin is incredible, achieving the rare feat of being both organic-sounding and at the same time hugely cinematic. How did the band go about creating such an epic sound? “We were lucky enough to work with Karl Daniel Liden who mixed and mastered the whole thing, who mastered our last album as well, and it’s a really phenomenal job that he’s done with it. He’s really amazing – a magician behind the soundboard! A lot of us in the band really don’t like a lot of more modern metal records because sometimes they can sound really overproduced, almost more in the vein of techno-style production and since we’re big fans of the old-school sounds of the Seventies, we still wanted to keep that live, organic feel. You really shouldn’t be making acoustic instruments sound electronic! We don’t really jam together as a band though because we all live so far apart. We actually recorded most of our parts separately for the album, which makes what Karl did even more special!” Daniel laughs.
Having only become an official member of the band in 2025 (but having played with them since 2019), In Somnolent Ruin also marks Daniel’s first album with the band. Despite DRACONIAN being legends of the doom scene, though, he wasn’t intimidated by this at all. “I don’t really view things like that,” he explains. “It’s all down to the chemistry between the people making the music. I don’t think it’s necessary to let history get in the way of doing what you want to do, so I try not to think about things in that way too much. I know what I want to do and sometimes you have to be strong and believe in yourself in that regard, especially in the music business otherwise no one would ever try new things out. I’ve pretty much played every tour and show that the band has done since 2019 so when it came to recording the album I was pretty comfortable with everything.”
Having established themselves in the 90s, the various members of DRACONIAN have experienced a great deal of change in the metal scene over the course of their career but, taking things right back to the start, we wondered which bands had influenced the group to set out on the path to epic doom glory. “Initially the guys were very much influenced by the death and black metal scenes of the early 90s but they didn’t just want to copy the bands they were listening to and when PARADISE LOST first really came along they became a big influence and ANATHEMA too, so that really epic, gothic kind of heavy music of that time hit them really hard in terms of inspiration.”
Having been one of the first acts to combine brutal death metal growling with clean female vocals DRACONIAN unwittingly laid down a template that has now become far more common in extreme metal and, as Daniel explains, this was very much a conscious decision within the band: “Yeah the guys always wanted to have a kind of ‘beauty and the beast’ kind of feeling to the vocals so that was very intentional from an early stage, incorporating both fragile and aggressive sides into the songs and I guess that’s when the trademark was born!” Does the band feel like we’ve now left behind the novelty of the involvement of female musicians in metal bands? “I definitely feel like we’ve moved past the negativity of it in many ways – like the idea that women somehow don’t belong in the scene – but there are still people that want to label you as this or that just because you have a female singer. Obviously it’s up to the people how they want to appreciate the music in their own way but honestly I don’t even like the term ‘female-fronted metal band’ or whatever. It’s just gothic doom metal you know? Why does it matter what gender anyone is? It’s definitely good that we’re making some progress away from those issues at least though.”
With the band already touring the globe in support of the new record – and if their recent South American dates are anything to go by they are sounding ferocious – they will no doubt be pulling into a venue near you soon, with European dates on the horizon for later in 2026 and into 2027. Revitalised, re-energised, re-DRACONIANised. You’d be mad to miss them.
In Somnolent Ruin is out now via Napalm Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS130 here.
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