Evergrey: Call Out The Dark

“I think ‘try to do everything as good as you can.’ I know that’s simple advice but it’s not easy to do,” says Rikard Zander, when asked what guidance he’d give his younger self. “I’ve been in the band twenty years and I’ve not done my best every time. I would try to convince myself to do as well as I can each time.” Rikard has spent the past two decades as the keyboard player for Swedish prog/power metal masters EVERGREY. He’s appeared on ten studio albums, played countless live shows and been around the world multiple times.

In theory, that continuous cycle of touring, recording and touring again should be getting tiresome by now. Living on buses can be emotionally exhausting and there’s only so much airport food you can eat before the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle loses its appeal. But his eyes light up and he’s full of enthusiasm when talking about their newest release.

A Heartless Portrait (The Orphean Testament) is EVERGREY’s thirteenth full-length and first for Napalm Records. It’s ten tracks of bombastic riffs, dramatic guitar solos, escalating synths and huge hooks and as Rikard describes it, it’s “very EVERGREY.” It’s a rich and expansive collection of songs, in debt to both crushing metal and mind-bending prog.

It’s following hot on the heels of last year’s Escape Of The Phoenix. That might make the cynical wary, but this is no rush job to satisfy the demands of a new label; it’s another welcome addition to their bulging discography.

Don’t expect sunshine and good cheer though. If you’ve checked out the promotional videos for Save Us and Midwinter Calls, the two first singles, you’ll get some idea of what’s coming. Torture and gore abound and there’s a recurring motif of people being forcibly blindfolded. Power metal is often regarded as a bouncier, nerdier subgenre of metal, but EVERGREY do a lot to challenge that stereotype.

“I don’t know why we keep doing dark stuff all the time,” he says through laughter, “It’s just kind of how it goes. We’re very jolly outside of the music. I think it goes back to where EVERGREY started from. Tom [Englund, vocals/guitars] is the only one left from when he started EVERGREY in 1996. He came from a death/black metal background and wanted to do dark music with clean vocals. I think it’s where he comes from and he still has that vision of EVERGREY and that’s why we keep sounding like we do. Tom’s voice is really special. Sometimes it feels like it doesn’t matter what music you give him; as soon as he does the vocals it sounds like EVERGREY.”

A Heartless Portrait also turned up earlier than expected purely because they needed something to do during the pandemic. Like so many of their contemporaries, they found their touring plans coming to an abrupt end when coronavirus shut down the world. So, they wrote and then wrote some more, practiced and bounced ideas off the walls and wound up with a worthy successor to Escape Of The Phoenix.

While this forced downtime has resulted in lots of new EVERGREY music, long-time supporters may be disappointed to notice that a major anniversary has passed. 2021 marked twenty years since the release of the In Search Of Truth album, a fan-favourite that has been referred to as their magnum opus. There are no plans to capitalise on this and have a celebratory tour though and if anything, Rikard seems keen to downplay its importance.

“We did play it through once, in like 2011 or something? We did the whole album in Atlanta at the Prog Power Festival. But that’s it, I don’t think we will do that again. I know a lot of people really like that album but it’s not like it’s a worldwide hit and a lot of people feel the same about other albums we’ve done. I’m pretty sure that was a one-time experience. You never know but I don’t think it’s going to happen again.”

This might be sad news for EVERGREY diehards, but it is understandable. They’ve now got two whole albums that have never been played live, along with the epic trilogy of Hymns For The Broken, The Storm Within and The Atlantic to draw from. And that’s just in the last eight years. EVERGREY in 2022 have a veritable dragon’s hoard of material to showcase, living off past glories isn’t for them.

And therein lies the reason why they’ve survived for so long. The desire to grow, write better songs and become better musicians underpins everything. As Rikard says, “I think we feel really blessed that we still can do this. I think everyone is kind of wanting EVERGREY to become a little bigger than we are. We’re not really satisfied and that’s why we always try to do better and better albums. We don’t try and copy an album from ten years ago because it was successful, we still want to grow. We’re not a big band but we are slightly getting bigger with every album. As long as we feel like we’re doing that we will continue.”

A Heartless Portrait (The Orphean Testament) is out now via Napalm Records.

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