Cyhra: Forging Their Way Across The Globe

One band that has caught the attention of a number of metalheads in the past few years is CYHRA and they are certainly making a name for themselves. While the band as a name may be fairly new, the members are no strangers to the music industry and have carved their own careers before forming to create what can be best described as a power metal supergroup.

Jake E, renowned for his time as a co-vocalist with AMARANTHE, formed CYHRA alongside ex-IN FLAMES guitarist Jesper Strӧmblad, and he lifted the lid on the band’s second studio record No Halos in Hell.

“We’ve got a lot more live experience together as a band!” he explains. “All of us have obviously played hundreds and maybe thousands of shows in our careers before but we never played together before. At this time, almost two years into our career, we have built up a really good live set and great live sound and so on and that is something that has proven to be a great success. I think that is the most important thing when it comes to the band in general; when it comes to the song writing, our second guitar player Euge Valovirta has contributed with songs to this new album which has given it an extra dimension in the song writing as well. In general, though, I think we found our sound pretty much as what we wanted it to be already on the first album, so this album is like a natural progression towards that.”

A lot of bands tend to have their own theme or setting that becomes the pinnacle of their sound and the focal point of their songs. This might be a focus on a particular topic such as mystical enchanted lands, but other bands have a more personal approach. Jake explained that with regards to the new record, there is certainly a much more personal perspective in the tracks.

“There’s especially one song that means the world to me, and that is a song called Battle From Within. That has a really powerful message. The whole song is about my brother that passed 10 years ago, and the fact that I never really coped with it, I just put the blanket over my head and just pretended that it was raining. And I did that for 10 years, until one day, where all the emotions just came like a fucking tsunami over me and I realised that maybe it’s time for me to take care of this. I’ve never been one of these guys that wanted to go to psychiatry or something like that, but I used the tools that made sense to me, so I started to write about it and then it actually helped me, it was almost like going to a psychiatrist, but I was my own psychiatrist in a way, I was talking to myself by writing songs,” he says. “The rest of the album in general is also very personal, but on different levels both with storylines, and concept wise, but I also want the listeners to make their own opinion about what songs are about. I usually try to write songs in three-dimensional space, where I have one vision with what the song is about, but I also want the fans or the listener to take on to them as their own songs and as their own lyrics and make them feel that they understand what it’s all about.”

CYHRA have been dubbed a supergroup due to the experience of all four band members coming together from some of the biggest bands to grace the metal world, but Jake admits that it was certainly not the original idea when the band came together. “Usually I say, to answer that question, that it’s not our fault that we’ve been in the business for 20 years, all of us and that we know famous people, can’t really help that! The intention with the band was never to form any kind of supergroup, we’re a hardworking band that want to go from zero to the top. Our intention is to be the biggest band in the world just as with everyone else that has a band. It just happened to be that more or less all of us came from another background with other albums and other adventures, so it’s a good thing obviously that people know who we are, we already have our own fan bases so we can at least skip some stepping stones. You’re getting a fan base in from the beginning, which is good, but still, it doesn’t matter what name you have, you still need to prove yourself. The fans are not going to stick around just because your name is Jesper or Jake, you have to prove to them that you can deliver good music that they like.”

The fan base has certainly been established from the individual careers of each of the band members, and CYHRA will be looking to add to that fan base in just a couple of weeks’ time when they join power metal giants BATTLE BEAST on their upcoming European tour, something Jake is very excited about.

“I can’t wait! We did three shows with them and sold out arenas in Finland in the beginning of the summer and it was amazing. The guys and girl in BATTLE BEAST are fantastic human beings, they’re kind and we had a great with them – I can’t wait to go on tour with them, and also, I’m a big fan of the band so I get to listen to them every now and then! BATTLE BEAST is a fantastic live band, and damn that Noora girl, she’s just amazing! She gives 110% in every fucking note that she delivers, it’s amazing to watch!”

What were the recording and writing processes like?

Jake: More or less the same as always for me – I sat a lot on my own before inviting the other guys, and the same for the other guys like Jesper and Euge, they were writing alone, and then we met up and checked out what kind of ideas we had. Then we started to dissect each other ideas, and I was the one that co-produced all the demos to get them in the same kind of mould; someone needs to be responsible to take all those riffs and ideas and make them sound right in the end. That was nice, and then we did a big tour with SABATON and KREATOR in 2018 , and after that one, I was so pumped with adrenaline and it was so fun to be out on the road again, so when I got home, I wrote more or less all the songs in a month or two. It was really, really nice, it went fast!

How do you feel this record compares to your debut record?

Jake: Sounding wise and structure wise I think that we follow the same kind of blueprint, so to say. The one thing that I figured out pretty soon after the first album was released and we started to tour on it was that when me and Jesper first started CYHRA years back, we had no intention or actually we had no plan whatsoever of what’s going to be the outcome of it! We didn’t know if  we were just going to write some songs for the fun of it and release them by ourselves or get a label and be one of those projects which just releases songs and albums but never tours, but then we decided that we were going to create a band and then that was when all the songs were already done. When we then finally went out to tour with the album, we realised that these songs are awesome, but some of the songs are not meant for live purposes.

IRON MAIDEN has tons of those songs which you love to listen to and you’re sitting having a beer, but you don’t get the right emotions and the right energy from them. When you’re at the concert, they just don’t work live, so to say. So when I sat down to start writing songs for No Halos in Hell, I had that in mind, I said to myself that for this album, any of the songs could be thrown into the live set, and it will work. That was my schematic on how to build those songs; I wanted to have songs that would work in a live environment and it wouldn’t matter if it would be song number one on the track list or song number 12, all of them works like that. We’ve done a couple of shows now and we’ve tried out seven or eight of them, I think all of them work perfectly, writing songs that has this interaction between the musicians on stage and the audience. I really focused when I wrote songs on this album to make them work live, at least in my head. You never know if a song will work live until you’ve tested them obviously, but so far I’ve proven myself to be correct because the songs that we’ve tried out works really really well. Usually I never have these thoughts and usually when I write songs I just write for the sake of a good song, but this time I put some extra effort into making the songs more vibrant in a way I can’t really explain.

What has it been like working with Nuclear Blast for the new record?

Jake: So far everything has been amazing. I am really happy, we have a great team with a lot of people behind us, they seem to support our cause and they seem to like our album, and I’m really happy to be on board. For me, Nuclear Blast is a label that I don’t know how many albums I bought from them during my younger years when I was a record collector! One day I told myself I’ll be on the roster, and now I am so it’s really fun!

What’s the reception been like for CHYRA since forming inn 2017?

Jake: It was really, really funny! There was tons of praise from fans, they really loved it. Then you had all the old IN FLAMES  fans that truly believe that now Jesper is back and now it’s going to be a new death metal record, and I have released probably 25 albums through my career, and I never growled a single note, and all of a sudden people believed that, okay, Jake is singing, he’s going to be a growl guy. I couldn’t really figure that out, people wish things and I can understand that and me being an IN FLAMES fan, I also would like to have a second Clayman come out, but that that won’t happen just because Jesper’s in the band! There was both praise and bad stuff coming in, but that’s the way it is. I believe that if you only want to get praise from people saying how good you are, that won’t bring you forward. I think that it’s the doubters and people that have this way of looking down to what you’re doing, I think, at least for me, those are the people that gives me the energy to prove myself that I’m right, they’re wrong.

How do you feel the metal scene has evolved over recent years?

Jake: It’s a weird climate to be honest, there has been many new bands that have come and gone, but there’s also a lot of bands that I don’t understand, but I guess that I’m getting older, and I still live in the world where Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II is the best album ever made! Kids today, they wake up to another world and music evolves, but there’s a lot of bands that are focusing all their energy into how they look on stage, but the music is just okay. There’s bands that has become gigantic – one of the exceptions is GHOST, which I really, really like that they put those stage clothes on and pretend they’re something else, but there’s tons of bands that is doing all this stuff where the music comes second, and I don’t want to talk shit about other bands in any way but I think that appearance has apparently become something that is valued more than the actual music craftsmanship. I’m not saying that I am correct because I’m almost 40 years old now, I am in the middle of my life, and people that grow up today, they have different perspectives. I was laughing at my parents when they couldn’t handle my Commodore 64 when I grew up, and now I have a six-year-old that masters my phone faster than I do so who am I to judge?! Things are changing, it’s just trying to keep up to the young guys that are coming next year!

From a personal perspective who has been your biggest influences on your music?

Jake: The weirdest thing with me is that, I was a big record collector when I grew up. I probably bought three to 5000 CDs. I used to work in a record store when I grew up and I had everything there close to hand and I always loved music and I love to listen to music, up until the day when I started to have a professional career. That’s when I actually quit listening to music to be honest, I listen to some music of course but if I’m on the subway or the train or whatever, I never put music on, I put some sort of YouTube documentary about how the universe was created or mission to Mars or whatever! I like to learn things, I don’t appreciate music that way anymore, I just love to make music. I love to compose music. To be fair, I think that I am still inspired by my childhood heroes, the reason why I became a singer in the first place was Michael Kiske from HELLOWEEN, and the bands that I grew up listening to was EUROPE, HELLOWEEN, BON JOVI, WHITESNAKE, IRON MAIDEN, JUDAS PRIEST, all those.

And then all of a sudden it just changed; HAMMERFALL was a big inspiration for me in the beginning too when they released their first album, so I don’t know what I’m inspired by music wise, I think that I like invent things myself. I don’t want to be sitting there in the studio saying to myself that “oh fuck this this sounds exactly like that song with that artist that I heard last week”. I listen to music in a professional way, I have a management where I might pitch to them if it’s good or not, or if I’m gonna sign them or not and so on. But sometimes you listen to music and you just hear that it’s obviously a fucking rip off, that they stolen songs from someone else, and I would be deadly afraid that it would ever happen to me. Obviously it’s hard to reinvent the wheel again, because all chord progressions have been done, but if you steal both the rhythm, the tempo, the chord progression and the vocal line and almost the lyrics well then it’s obvious that you’re trying to steal someone else’s work.

You’re also playing SABATON’s Open Air festival in August next year, how much of an impact have they had for both yourself and the band?

Jake: Not a lot music wise to be fair, we’re as far away from SABATON as you possibly can get, I guess! But SABATON are great friends of mine, I used to be there pyro technician back in the day as well. I used to work for the band so I know them pretty well, they’re great, fantastic guys. I really must say that I admire Par the bass player and how he works and it runs the band, it’s very impressive, I look up to him a lot.

How different is a festival to your own tour?

Jake: The biggest differences is obviously that when you play a festival, you play in front a much bigger crowd. When you play in front of this crowd, as a brand-new band, you have probably 80% of them that is there has never heard you before. So, on a festival, you need to put your big boy shoes on and really try to impress people and get them to like you. While on your own show your fans have obviously come there to see you because they like you, and on your own show, I feel at least a little bit more relaxed and play around a little bit more and try to be more spontaneous!

What future plans have you got in store?

Jake: As I’ve always said throughout my whole career, is that one day we’ll have IRON MAIDEN opening up for us, but I guess that we need to hurry because I don’t know how many years IRON MAIDEN has left! We want to try to make this band as big as we possibly can, reach out to as many people as possible – the message that we’re having with our music and we love our music. We love our fans, I used to tell the fans that without you we’re nothing, and that’s obviously true because if no one buys the album or no one comes to the show, we have no jobs. We do everything for our fans and they’re doing everything for us, we keep growing as a band and we just want to go out and play more, come to more cities, more countries and conquer!

No Halos In Hell is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

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