Beast In Black: Towards The Cybernetic Horizon

It might have seemed like a curveball when BEAST IN BLACK released Moonlight Rendezvous, the first single from their new studio album, Dark Connection. After their debut focused solely on tales from anime Berserk and follow up From Hell With Love expanded this to other movies and animes, to see the band jump into the synth-laden world of cyberpunk – taking their soaring power metal with them – could have been perceived as a knee-jerk deviation. But for those who know founder Anton Kabanen well, it’s no surprise that this was always in the band’s long-term plans.

“I’d decided that the third album was going to be cyberpunk back in 2018,” he reveals. “Given my love for anime, I’ve always been about the relationships between humans and human robots. However, if it wasn’t for the pandemic, the album would have probably seen the light of day in 2023.”

With the time they would have spent touring now free, Anton not only began work on the album but also the video for Moonlight Rendezvous, a stunning seven-minute epic set in a futuristic city that takes in advanced technology, flying vehicles, underground shopping centres and plenty of laser guns. How long did this video take?

“One and a half years,” states Anton. “I wasn’t entirely working just on the album, but the video itself and the first script for that was ready in May 2020. That said, there was still a rush in the end because when you have that much time – especially with people who have a perfectionist nature – the more difficult it becomes to let it go, so that’s a double-edged sword”

Of course, Anton managed to relinquish Dark Connection eventually but, true to himself, hasn’t taken the time to admire his band’s new album. “My thoughts are already in the future; I don’t want to listen to the album either. Naturally I stand behind the songwriting a hundred percent, but I no longer want to listen to it – you could say I’m fed up with it.”

Anton might not wish to revisit Dark Connection, but fans certainly will – it’s an hour of stupidly catchy, upbeat power metal to make you dance and raise your best shrilled voice into the sky over and over again. Moonlight Rendezvous and recent single One Night In Tokyo aside, there’s the galloping thunder of Highway to Mars, the disco-infused Hardcore and the 80s B-Movie feel of Revengeance Machine. However, there’s always room for some Berserk stories and they’re duly provided in the form of three song curve Dark New World, To The Last Drop Of Blood and Broken Survivors. The question here, though, is whether Anton will ever run out of things to talk about from the series?

“I think it’s always something that will stick with BEAST IN BLACK – I imagine at least one song based from Berserk will find its way onto an album. At some point though, I’ve been thinking that I’ll write an album based entirely on the anime from the very beginning – the idea would be to start with Volume One, Chapter One, write ten songs which go chronologically and just keep going. Trouble is, the story is 40 or 41 volumes long and there’s usually about 15 to 20 chapters per volume! So I don’t know what to do with it, but I’ve been fantasising about it!”

A quick calculation means, at most, Anton would be penning 8200 songs to complete the whole series; to put that into context, if he’d been writing one song a day since January 1st, 2000, he’d still be nine months away from finishing. As it is, he’s given us BEAST IN BLACK instead, a band who have risen through the ranks quickly and toured extensively with some of metal’s biggest names, including a UK arena run as main support to NIGHTWISH in 2018. Did that raise the pressure of the writing for Dark Connection? “It’s the same pressure for every album,” Anton explains. “You have to put everything into it, almost to the point of torturing yourself; you have to squeeze everything out of your brains and your body. If you’re not going to use it all, you’ll never go up in your career, and that’s why I think musicians always get to one hundred percent, which means the pressure is the same.”

However, he was not about to bow to one particular pressure – the potential of writing a song about current affairs to feature on the album. “I consciously wanted to ignore the coronavirus on this album. I think people are fed up with songs about lockdown and the like, it’s worn out really fast. As such, I wanted to stay true to my own kind of escapism, because I know that will resonate in people stronger and in a more long-lasting way.”

Dark Connection is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

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