Cabal: Find What You Love And Let It Kill You

To be noticed in the sea of emerging bands you need to make an instant impact and this is precisely what Denmark’s CABAL achieved with their debut release Mark Of Rot back in 2018. Since then they have continued to impress with one of their career highlights thus far being their performance at Copenhell Festival.

“It’s one of the biggest thumbs up we can get from the metal industry in Denmark,” declares frontman Andreas Bjulver Paarup. “It was a surreal experience for us as SLIPKNOT‘s dressing room was right next to ours. SLIPKNOT was one of my main influences in music when I was younger and they were one of the first heavy bands I came across. Corey Taylor was getting a coffee right next to me but I was too starstruck to say hi to him! We’ve seen a significant rise in attendance at shows following on from this and we really appreciate the boost that this opportunity gave us.”

The time has now come for CABAL to release their highly anticipated follow up. An endeavour which the quintet haven’t taken lightly. “In the music business it’s a common saying that the second album is always your hardest. There is definitely some pressure on this release as we want to grow and we want to be even better. We want our fans to think it is better too. Now we actually have people to disappoint if we fuck up!”

Drag Me Down sees CABAL delve even deeper into their devastating arsenal, experimenting with new methods to diversify their offerings. “It’s super heavy and dark. It’s also an album where we’ve tried new stuff which we haven’t really touched on before. You may have noticed from the singles that some of it is quite synth heavy. We just tried to experiment a bit more. We are really proud of Mark Of Rot but it was pretty much the same sound the whole way through,” admits Andreas. “We wanted to leave room for experimentation on this one and broaden our soundscape in some way. Mark Of Rot was kind of an environmental theme, focusing on the demise of humanity with this one there is a bit of that but we wanted to make it a bit more personal. The title Drag Me Down is dealing with trying to be a musician and having a life at the same time. It’s kind of coming to the conclusion that if it has to ruin my life then so be it, willingly being dragged down. That’s kind of how it is if you want to be in the music business because there isn’t much money to be made and it’s very hard to get it all to work and balancing it with a job and finding a job which is cool with you leaving for extensive periods of time. Just trying to be a decent, normal human being and continuing to do this at a high level.”

Mark Of Rot treated us to impressive guest appearances from CJ McMahon [THY ART IS MURDER] and Filip Danielsson [HUMANITY’S LAST BREATH] and Drag Me Down looks to up the ante with another round of high profile features. This time in the form of Matt Heafy [TRIVIUM], Jamie Hails [POLARIS] and Kim Song Sternkopf [MØL]. Services which were surprisingly easy to acquire. “Matt is a big fan. We saw him posting about our stuff when we did the debut album. We played at Copenhell and TRIVIUM were playing there as well and during their soundcheck he was playing some of the riffs from False Light,” says Andreas.

“We were like ‘Holy shit, this guy is super into it’. He approached us in the backstage area and we just hung out for a while. He was the nicest dude ever and we just dropped into conversation about him featuring on our new album and he was like ‘Yeah sure, let’s do it’. We saw Jamie from POLARIS posting on one of our Instagram posts about merch or something asking about if we ship to Australia so we joked saying ‘Oh we’ll send you a free shirt if you do a feature’ and he was cool with that which was a great deal for us. POLARIS are super nice dudes. They work really fucking hard and they’re super talented and the stuff they put out is quality.”

Drag Me Down is out now via Long Branch Records.

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