Bombus: It’s The End of the World. Time To Rock!

A light hearted approach to the mess we’ve made of the world is really refreshing. BOMBUS are prepared to take us through what feels like the end times in a huge party vibe. Being a band that have created a sound that infuses the best of melodic progressive metal, the groove of HIGH ON FIRE, the outrageous fun of classic bands like MOTÖRHEAD and the contemporary atmospherics of GHOST. Their music is flamboyantly confident, gritty and instantly recognisable. Here, we spoke with frontman Feffe Berglund about how the band keeps on writing, the change in the scene in the past ten years, and the enthusiasm making music as a five piece has brought to the band.

It’s clear that this album has pushed the band to new heights in their writing, and the focus has resulted in potentially their most fulfilled album to date. With a sense of all killer no filler, it’s easy to wonder what didn’t make it on to this record. “Thanks for having us and thank you for your kind words! Glad you like it!” Feffe humbly replies, before explaining. “Yes, there are always more songs in the making, writing music is an ever-ongoing process and we always have new material that is more or less finished. But when it comes to making an album somewhere along the way we decide to focus on some of the material more to get a good balance on the album as a whole. We want our albums to be diverse, have different tempos, be dynamic and to be interesting from the first to the last note so we kind of pick the material that ends up on the album from that perspective. So, if a song don´t make it on there, it doesn’t mean it’s not good enough but it might just fit better on the next one, you know.”

Having already had three albums out in the ten years the band have been together, the process of making their particular style of music must have become an almost subconscious thing that happens on a day to day, be it together on tour or in more domestic, mundane circumstances. “The writing process is a constant thing,” Feffe agrees. “We write on the road, when at home, while driving a car or whenever. Often just short fragments, a melody, a beat or a riff. Often, I just hum it in straight into the recording thing on my phone. Then I sit down in my home studio and start tracking and make demos. I have hundreds of short weird recordings on my phone that I go through at times. Some of them are just complete crap, like some insane person mumbled some inaudible rant on there but a lot of it is a cool idea for a new song. I have stuff on there from years back and since I’ve been writing music for BOMBUS for about ten years now I feel like it’s getting easier and easier because we have so much unfinished material laying around.”

The latest album, Vulture Culture, is set for release in mid-November. This time around, the band worked with producer Daniel Johansson to really add some extra weight and new perspective to their creating. When asked if his contribution was beneficial, the positive response was clear. “Absolutely!” Feffe exclaims. “Daniel is a high energy guy that is absolutely full of ideas (some better than others) and there is really no end to his creativity. He is all over the place and sometimes he has a hard time focusing on one thing at a time but he´s super musical and is blessed with ‘dog ears’ and hears everything. He is also great with arrangements, timing and spotting hooks. So even though (or maybe because) he´s unconventional in the way he works at times, he really brings something to every production he is involved in.”

With the recent addition of Simon Solomon as a new guitarist in the lineup means the dynamic of the band has expended. With that extra axe wielder on board, the obvious question is has the band’s set of songs become bigger than ever? “Yeah for sure! We brought Simon on board mostly because ever since The Poet and The Parrot I’ve moved more towards being the main vocalist in the band,” Feffe clarifies. “Before me and Matte [Säker, guitars] shared the vocals about 50/50, on Repeat Until Death I did most of the vocals and in Vulture Culture I do all of them. So, I wanted to focus more on that and I wanted to improve my singing in every aspect and that meant that I wanted to be less bound to playing guitar live. We brought Simon on and he is such a fantastic guitarist, easily the best I’ve ever played with and he has really contributed to a lot of the arrangements on the album and the sound of the whole thing. Because we have three guitarists we wrote and arranged the album in such a way. Underneath the solos for example there’s often like an arpeggio or something and there’s a rhythm guitar underneath that. I mean you can always record like that but then you have to compromise, re-arrange and cut stuff when you play it live, but we don’t have to. Vulture Culture is really an album we can perform in its entirety live. So yeah, we´re glad to have him on board.”

The album itself has a pretty current theme; the way that people are damaging the world and the impending doom that might mean. It’s almost impossible to escape that in any form of culture today, and it’s a topic that while BOMBUS have enjoyed writing about, it’s not one they want to get too dogmatic about. “All of our albums are about humanity in one way or another,” he says fairly. “We’re just really interesting and the human stupidity never cease to amaze me. So, we are a never-ending source of inspiration. A bunch of great apes knowing we’re fucking it all up but we just can’t control ourselves. We’re so clever but yet programmed to self-destruct. That said we are not a political band and we don’t have any agenda as such we just observe and make Rock n’ Roll!”

The band have been creating in one evolution or another for ten years, and it’s clear there’s been a constant chipping away to finding their final form and writing better and better material. “The longer we do this, the closer we get to the essence of what we’re about, I think. We have a clearer vision in forehand of how we want the next album to sound and how we should get there. And as I said, we now have so much material laying around just waiting to be finished so it’s easier to just go down and open the vaults and start dusting stuff off and bring it to life. We got a song on Vulture Culture called It’s all over and I started on that like 10 years ago and it didn’t get finished until now. And that is in my opinion one of the best songs I ever wrote. So it really gets easier and also more fun the longer we do this.”

Making a record with such a solid lineup of players, and with songs that require a big sound, the dynamics of those songs have to be completely engaging. There’s a sense of sharpness to Vulture Culture, a hybrid of their previous works in terms of length an intensity. “The idea of Vulture Culture was really to make it a mix between Repeat Until Death and our first two albums. Repeat Until Death have a catchiness and a directness to it and we wanted to keep that but also have longer songs with more parts and longer instrumental parts which you can find on our two albums before that. So, we really went back tracking with the aim to cherry pick from our own catalogue.”

Vulture Culture is out now via Century Media Records.

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