INTERVIEW: Adam Grahn – Royal Republic

They might have had to reschedule their upcoming tour until the autumn to allow for further work on their new album, but it’s full steam ahead for Swedish rockers ROYAL REPUBLIC as they prepare to hit the road again in support of fifth release Club Majesty. Distorted Sound spoke with Adam Grahn about the album, the difficulties face and whether they do, indeed, have any guilty pleasures…

Adam, thank you very much for joining me today. First and foremost, what’s it like to go through the whole rescheduling of a tour because you’ve run into problems with the album?

Adam: Well, it’s not the most pleasant of experiences but it was a necessary evil in this case. It wasn’t in the writing of the album, it all revolved around logistics – getting the right people together, their availabilities etc – it’s a tough job, but we got it in the end and I think everybody would agree it was worth it.

And I imagine you’re a lot happier now that everything’s back on track?

Adam: Very much so, yes! I’ve not been more pumped to start a tour, ever. It’ been ten long months and we feel that we have an album…I mean, you always feel that you have the album of your career when you’ve made a new one, the whole ‘this is the best one yet!’ approach [laughs] but this is definitely the best one yet! We can’t wait to get it out on the road.

Well, in preparation for speaking to you I listened to Club Majesty along with your whole back catalogue across today…

Adam: Oh wow, that must have take you, like, a whole hour!

Yeah, sounds about right! But the new record is just so colourful, fun and bouncy. Did you approach it with any sort of mindset when it came to writing it?

Adam: We approached it with the angel that anything goes, really. All boundaries are out, let’s use every weapon at our disposal, so to say, and I think we were also fuelled by the joy that we felt and the band vibes from the Weekend Man tour, because that was definitely the most intense one we’ve done. We usually pride ourselves on being a very responsible, professional band and whilst I still believe we do, treating the show as number one and never letting the partying get in the way of the performance, but there was a lot of good vibes and we took that into the studio, so that’s what’s probably bleeding through a little bit.

You’ve got eleven tracks on it, none of which are over four minutes long which makes for a short, punchy album. I’m assuming that wasn’t intentional?

Adam: I mean, it’s not like we sit down and say ‘Let’s write sixty minute of music’! We write a bunch of songs and the album could have had eight tracks, it could have had fifteen. We ended up on eleven and nobody can take ROYAL REPUBLIC for more than eleven songs anyway, so that works out nicely! Even WE can’t take more than eleven! [laughs]

So we’ll expect your live shows to be exactly eleven songs long,then?

Adam: Exactly! Eleven songs, straight off, no encore! [laughs]

Amazing! You’ve got a nice amount of festival dates in the summer including your first appearance at Download for three years. I know you love being on the road and you are very much a band to bring the party atmosphere, but would you say that ROYAL REPUBLIC has a special relationship with any particular fanbase or country outside of your native Sweden?

Adam: Not really. It started out being centred around Germany, the Netherlands, France and whatnot, but over the years with every album cycle it’s started to even out a little. We still have a lot of business in central Europe, but the UK is always a lovely place to come back to, we always have a huge amount of fun with you guys – we played Reading and Leeds Festival last summer and had an absolute blast, like you mentioned Download was amazing to have that many people turn up for our show, so we can’t wait to get back.

Awesome! And I did notice that when you come back to the UK on your full tour, you’re finishing up in London on Halloween. Given your love for a massive party, you’ve got to be planning something special for then, right?

Adam: Ohhh, I’ll have to add that to my ‘remember to do’ list, you’ve caught me out a bit! We’ll cook something up, I’m sure!

Excellent! And once the tour’s finished, you’re playing the Porsche Arena in Germany in February next year. Give that you’ve announced that so far in advance, would it be fair to say that show is a big deal?

Adam: Yeah, I think it was more that it was the first available date rather than anything special – it would have probably ended up with the rest of the fall shows but there weren’t any dates available around that time. Either way though, we’ll probably go back out after New Year anyway, so it’ll join up again and become one of several stops on the next leg of the tour.

Do you have any particular favourite songs off Club Majesty?

Adam: Well, put it this way, I have very few I don’t like! I like all of it but Fireman & Dancer is very close to my heart as it was one of the first songs cut for the record. Undercover is another, as is Can’t Fight the Disco for many, many reasons. But I’m proud of the whole album actually, I think it’s some of our finest works.

Do you think you’ve finally got a quintessential ROYAL REPUBLIC album in terms of sound, or have they all had their own qualities?

Adam: I’d say that we came into our own on Weekend Man. When we released [debut album] We Are the Royal we had only played about five shows when we had that record out, but to expect a band to have their entire identity and sound to be cemented at that time in their career is not really fair; we wouldn’t have expected that at least! We all feel that we made that with Weekend Man and Club Majesty is building on that but opening up the door more and not hiding influences or stuff like that anymore. We decide what’s ROYAL REPUBLIC, no-one else.

Yeah, that’s fair! One of the other questions that pops up a lot when discussing you is the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’ and I know that you’re very firm as a band to say that you don’t believe in them and there’s only pleasure, but do you have any, even secretly?

Adam: No, not at all! [laughs]

Didn’t think so! So what sort of stuff was influencing you when you wrote Club Majesty?

Adam: I think the same stuff was influencing us as the rest of the albums, it’s just that this time we weren’t afraid to use them at all. So many bands would back off when faced with a choice of left or right; they’d go right and say ‘No, we can’t do this because people would think we were a boyband or this and that’. We just went ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to go left?’ and we kinda stuck with that feeling because there’s something about that really works for us, that turns us on and hopefully the other people can hear it as well.

Well I think Club Majesty will send you onto the next level; it’s a wonderful piece of music and you deserve all the plaudits you will get with it. Adam, thank you very much for speaking to me today.

Adam: Thank you for your kind words!

Club Majesty is out now via Nuclear Blast Records. 

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