Accept: Too Mean To Die
Despite working on Too Mean To Die for the best part of 2020, Wolf Hoffmann seems reluctant to describe ACCEPT’s forthcoming album.
“It’s difficult to summarise something I’ve been working on for eight months. All I can tell you is that for the people we’ve played it to, they’re calling it a good, enthusiastic ACCEPT album. My work on it is done and it’s up to the fans to decide if they like it, but the initial response has been great.”
It’s a fair point and to be frank, it’s not wrong. Too Mean To Die is terrific; eleven cuts of high-energy hard rock, packed with memorable riffs, big, shout-along choruses and rabble-rousing lyrics. It’s going to be one of the early highlights of 2021 and decades after they first formed, ACCEPT have a lot of gas left in the tank. So even though he’s calling from a surprisingly cold Florida, Hoffmann is in a noticeably good mood when he speaks with us. He doesn’t stop smiling through the entire chat and speaks with more excitement than musicians half his age. Reforming the band in 2009 has given him a shot in the arm and it’s certainly taking a while for the effects to fade.
“You have to remember we took a long time off, ACCEPT weren’t fully active for fourteen years and we all did different things. I was a photographer for a while, so when we came back with Blood Of The Nations, it was really exciting. I guess we had to step back for a while to really appreciate it and I love what we’re doing now. Even though people keep talking about our earlier years and the success we had then, these past five albums are some of the most fun I’ve had.”
That run of albums is certainly impressive; Blood Of The Nations, Stalingrad, Blind Fury and The Rise Of Chaos were all hugely enjoyable and Too Mean To Die continues the winning streak. The songs are reliably entertaining but there’s a lyrical depth to them too, something ACCEPT aren’t always given credit for. Zombie Apocalypse for instance could be interpreted purely as another fun addition to the “heavy metal zombie song” trope, but there’s a subtext here which is only too deliberate: “Mark [Tornilllo, vocals] wrote the lyrics to this and it’s more about how disconnected people are. They’re wandering around looking at their phones and it seems so impersonal. When he explained that I thought ‘Okay, I like this,’ I guess it’s similar to the song Analog Man (from The Rise Of Chaos) and people just being at odds with the world. But Mark’s like that, he’s an old-fashioned type of guy. He is the Analog Man.”
That theme of being at odds with the modern world is revisited in Overnight Sensation, a song that gently pokes fun at Instagram celebrities. ACCEPT aren’t just angrily shouting at the youngsters though, there’s also The Undertaker, a “cool horror story turned into a song” that sadly has nothing to do with the professional wrestling legend, and The Best Is Yet To Come, which really turns heads. Discussing this one gives a unique insight into the guitarist’s philosophy on life: “We had the lyrics to this before we had the music and wrote the music to fit around them, whereas normally we write the music first. I like to think it’s an optimistic song, it’s very much my outlook to think that the best is yet to come. We haven’t written the best ACCEPT song yet or played our best show.”
This last line goes a long way towards explaining how the band have remained active for so long, even as trends rise and fall and other bands fall by the wayside. It shows too in the way Wolf isn’t aggravated by the difficulties in recording during a pandemic. Producer Andy Sneap couldn’t get over for a lot of the recording, but was that a problem? Not when Zoom calls exist and things can be done online.
And as for the line-up changes? No, that was something to be embraced as well. Bassist Martin Motnik and guitarist Phillip Shouse are appearing on their first ACCEPT album and Wolf describes both the newcomers as “great guys, great musicians. They contributed a lot of ideas. This was great news for me because I don’t want to be writing all the music, otherwise it’s just one guy and it risks getting one-dimensional,” he laughs. “So to have them bringing their own thing to the table was a big benefit to the album.”
ACCEPT have weathered plenty of storms and ridden the crest of many waves over their long career, but if he could go back in time to the day he started, would he give his younger self any advice? Wolf thinks for a long time before answering. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’d tell myself any advice. Even if I made bad decisions, the only way to learn from them is to make them in the first place. The only way not to make bad decisions, is to make no decisions at all and that just leads to a boring life. No, I don’t think I’d tell myself anything.”
Too Mean To Die is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.
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