Der Weg Einer Freiheit: Inside The Way of Freedom

Nikita Kamprad reaches forward on his desk and picks up a thin, tan coloured book. To any other pair of eyes, it’s an unassuming item, potentially one used for doodles, quick mental notes or even a game of noughts and crosses. Yet for Nikita, his band’s latest record – Innern, the sixth effort by German black metallers DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT – wouldn’t exist without it.

“My dad gave it to me a few years ago”, he says of the diary, written by a German prisoner of war while incarcerated in France towards the end of World War Two. “He had read it and concluded it was not written by anyone in his family, so it must have been given to my grandfather (who was in the same camp).”

“My father is very supportive of my work and therefore familiar with my lyrics,” he continues, “and he told me to read it because the contents reminded him of those, so I did and he was absolutely right – there was something that really resonated with the way I compose words.”

The diary would inspire three of the six songs that make up Innern, namely Xibalba, Eos and Fragment, and Nikita also found his own, personal kinship with the unnamed prisoner. “There were passages about looking up to the sky and this image of the stars, which has always been a vessel I’ve used. Many of my lyrics are based around the stars and the universe because it’s so infinite and far away, but also omnipresent. And this soldier somehow met the same vein that I was writing.”

Stylistically, Innern is the most introspective and vulnerable album DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT have released to date. It’s beautifully balanced between the harsh and the hushed – tracks like opener Marter are firmly in the more traditional black metal camp, with wailing guitars, rolling drums and Nikita’s icy wails and screams, but there are numerous occasions where that gives way to expansive and ambient post-metal, like on the aforementioned Xibalba. When the human psyche is examined in such a way, the music that results is just as, if not more, potent as any song about worshipping Satan. 

The album was written to be performed live, with many songs recorded in one take. “The imperfections are in there too,” Nikita reveals. “I wouldn’t call them mistakes, as such, but we didn’t want to take them out because it made the record so human and natural. Many bands forget that as well; it’s important to leave your character in the music and removing errors can suck out the soul.”

Nikita is also growing as a person with his approach to albums. It’s not unfair to say that DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT is his band: he is, after all, the only founding member after Tobias Jaschinsky left in 2012, but in recent years shouldering everything had begun to take its toll. “Up until (2017’s) Finisterre it was a one-man show, but I was so fed up with the whole process, such as recording all the instruments, that afterwards I didn’t want to take six weeks of solitude anymore,” he says, “so with Noktvrn (2021), I invited my band to pay their instruments for the first time and it made the record far better than if I’d done it all myself.”

“This time, we took it a step further whereby everyone played his own instruments, but I also collaborated with Nicolas [Rausch, guitars] on (closing track) Forlorn and that’s had great feedback in a live setting. I’m not ready for a whole album to be written by everyone, but we may have more than one song next time around, we’ll see.”

Forlorn is the third DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT track with English lyrics as opposed to German, which were also written by Nicolas. “The simple fact is that he didn’t write them in German!” Nikita admits. “He brought the song to me after I told the band we still had space on the album’s play time and I felt creatively empty, and we worked on it together. But it was most natural for him to write lyrics in English, so that’s what we ended up doing!”

As of writing, DER WEG EINRER FREIHEIT have completed a short European run in support of Innern, with a few dates left this year and a few already scheduled for 2026 – it’s expected the UK will be announced for the latter and in due course. Given the manner in which Innern was recorded, it’s going to be best appreciated in the flesh, but until then the album stands tall and proud as the best that the band have offered so far, a journey of looking inwards in order to bring forth those qualities of one’s self that are optimal for showing outwards at the world.

Innern is out now via Season Of Mist. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS125 here:

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