DragonForce: Extreme Power Metal
Over the last twenty years, few British bands have made as much of an impact within the realms of power-metal as DRAGONFORCE. Since forming back in 1999, the band have gone from strength to strength, notably scoring mainstream recognition back in 2007 when Through The Fire And Flames set the internet alight as part of Guitar Hero III, and have continued on strongly ever since. Now on the cusp of releasing their eighth studio album, we caught up with guitarist Herman Li to find out more about the record’s retro-futuristic style, how the band embraced streaming culture during its creation, and their imminent worldwide touring plans.
One of the most striking things about Extreme Power Metal comes before you even hit play on the album itself, with the album’s cover art conjuring up an immediate mental image of the best in 80s action movies, with its comic book visuals depicting the band’s members as futuristic armored soldiers in front of a giant explosion and monstrous metallic dragon. “Sam [Totman, guitars] and I pretty much came up with the concept for all this,” Herman reveals to us via Skype. “We were talking about it and just came up with a bunch of ideas for the artwork that we thought were cool, different kinds of styles, and we pretty much told the designer exactly how we wanted like us at the front, the grid at the back with the dragon coming back to life, flying out of an explosion. We said we wanted it to look a bit like the game Far Cry: Blood Dragon, with that kind-of neon purple type of thing; we wanted to go a little bit Gears of War in the way we’re all dressed, or like Starship Troopers with our weapons and the way those are designed, everything like that”.
On the actual recording front, the sessions for Extreme Power Metal saw the band set up in LA with producer Damien Rainaud, but also saw Li and co. breaking new ground, by live-streaming much of their creative process out to the public via Twitch – bringing their fanbase closer than ever before to the creative process. “I’m having a lot of fun doing Twitch. It’s something that I feel pretty at home with, and the people there are really cool, the audience there,” Herman explains. “Really it’s giving something back to the fans, something that they haven’t seen before. And they’ve been helping shape this album too, with the lyrics writing sessions, the guitar solos, recording, they’ve been part of this for many months; I mean, we started streaming in October last year. It’s been pretty crazy, and that’s only the beginning. I’ve been saying to people – we’re going to take the streaming on tour. We tested it in Germany a few weeks ago, I’ve got two different [rigs] that I’m currently testing and I’m trying to find the time to try and improve it all because we plan to stream our first show in its entirety somewhere on the new tour.”
Easily the most laugh-out-loud moment on Extreme Power Metal, and perhaps soon to become one of the most controversial, comes towards its conclusion, as the band yet again dip into the well of cover songs following their take on the Johnny Cash classic Ring of Fire back in 2014; this time fully embracing their cheesy side with a frankly ludicrous turbo-charged speed-metal take on Celine Dion’s iconic uber-ballad My Heart Will Go On from Titanic, that’s sure to turn heads upon the album’s release. “Oh, that was Sam’s idea,” Herman laughs when quizzed on how such a left-field inclusion found itself on the record, “This is Sam’s specialty – taking a song and completely transforming it into a DRAGONFORCE style. And so it’s a cover, but it doesn’t sound anything like the original; there’d be no point otherwise. It’s cool though, I mean, it’s really catchy and really uplifting. It’s a great song, I mean, we’re talking about taking a hit song and just turning it into extreme power metal!”
Next up for the band is an extensive world tour, starting in October in the US, before hitting the UK in November with hotly-tipped Japanese power-metallers LOVEBITES and synthwave-meets-shred duo MCROCKLIN & HUTCH, and continuing on to mainland Europe in 2020. “We’re going to be bringing back some old songs like Cry For Eternity that we’ve never played on tour,” Li notes excitedly of the trek. “That’s an insane song that people have been asking for, so we’re bringing that in. We’ve got a few songs that we’ve been playing for a while now that we’re probably going to drop because we’ve got some really brilliant songs we’ve been talking about like Remembrance Day, Highway To Oblivion and The Last Dragonborn – I know people wanna hear that one for sure. So we’re gonna bring some new songs, and I would say that the album’s really good, and nobody’s gonna be like ‘Oh this is boring!’ the second we say we’re gonna play a new song!” he laughs. “And of course, we’re going to have those classics as well, it’s fine. Some songs though we’ve done to death recently so, if you didn’t catch it on a previous tour, you probably won’t on this one!”
Extreme Power Metal is out now via earMUSIC. DRAGONFORCE are featured in our latest digital issue. Subscribe to our Patreon Page to read the feature.
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