Obscura: A Breath Of Fresh Air

A lot of bands have taken the unfortunate touring draught as the opportunity to focus on letting their creative juices pour out as they studiously work on new material. It is questionable whether the majority have been quite as productive as OBSCURA founding member and frontman Steffen Kummerer who has had the unenviable task of handling the promotional duty for multiple albums simultaneously.

“It’s been quite funny as I’ve been promoting OBSCURA and THULCANDRA at the same time so sometimes I’m talking to the same journalist twice in a matter of days.” Whilst this process has required a lot of time in Steffen‘s schedule he is very excited for the latest chapter of OBSCURA to be unveiled. “You can expect a lot of surprises and more organic production this time round. We’ve done something we’ve never done before with this album, we’ve been spontaneous. We’ve just finished our long-lasting run of album concepts which has taken us around ten years. When this finished we had a lot of changes within the band, we’ve changed the record label, the producer, the artist for the artwork so this really feels like a blank page for us. We felt like we could just start from scratch so this was quite exciting and we decided to go in a direction where we didn’t care too much anymore about what people think. We’ve been pretty narrow-minded death metalheads over the years, like we couldn’t use keyboards or clean vocals because they’re not metal enough. It’s fascinating how many different styles landed on this album in the end. I hope you can hear the simple joy and excitement we had writing, recording and producing this album from beginning to end. A breath of fresh air for OBSCURA!”

The new era of the band begins with impending album, A Valediction. A release which has pushed OBSCURA‘s offerings further than ever before. “This album is going to be the beginning of a new trilogy, the first album is just about to be released and I already have the titles, artwork, concepts, colours and even a couple of songs ready for the next releases,” explains Steffen. “We know what we’re doing but we don’t want to follow the same guidelines as we did in the past. We want it to be more organic and see how it unfolds and have a more human touch to it. This was why we decided to change the producer, to allow for a broader production with this album and I’m very happy with how it turned out. You can interpret this album in a few different ways but my interpretation of it was that I had to say a lot of farewells over the years to friends, family members and also people I’ve shared the stage with and respected like Sean Reinert, Sean Malone and Alexi Laiho but it would be quite negative to only focus on writing about people leaving this planet.”

“Sometimes leaving something behind you may be rather uplifting and allow for a more optimistic future. For example, In Unity deals with my family leaving Eastern Germany before the wall was down and we had to escape through Hungary and Austria and leave behind our entire existence towards a future which we didn’t know was better or worse than what we had already faced. These kind of topics made the musical palette quite broad and deep in my opinion and the lyrics shifted in different directions. It felt like I had a lot more freedom. There’s so much to tell, it’s like a whole story from beginning to end.”

As well as being a clean slate, A Valediction welcomes back guitarist Christian Münzner and bassist Jeroen Paul Thesseling who contributed during the Cosmogenesis and Omnivium era as well as the introduction of talented drummer David Diepold. A decision which Steffen took very little time deliberating. “After we had finished the last tour for Diluvium, which was one of the most successful European tours we’ve done in a long time, I got a message to say that the three gentlemen decided they wanted to leave the band and do something else, taking a different approach and shifting the style of the music to something which wouldn’t have worked with OBSCURA. At the core we are a death metal band and that’s the reason this band was formed over 20 years ago and we will stay like that. When they decided to leave it took me two weeks to assemble an entirely different lineup. After a couple of calls and emails, they were all on board and as we all know each other quite well it was super easy to work together as we know each other’s strengths and it was just super smooth.”

A Valediction may provide a few surprises to the avid listeners of OBSCURA who have followed their trailblazing path of proficient technicality, particularly the arrival of clean vocals, accessible hooks and melodies in amongst the expected ferocity. “These days I find myself listening to a lot less ‘headache music’ and I would rather listen to the likes of MASTODON, GHOST or ARCHITECTS,” admits Steffen. “They have certain songwriting styles where the focus shifts a little bit more toward the arrangement itself and the big stadium choruses. It was definitely something that helped me and gave more structure to the songs. I feel like the songs feel a little more fluent, not only because of the influences I mentioned but we also wanted to write songs that translate into a live setting. OBSCURA is a live act and we probably spend more time on tour than in the studio so you have to think about how you can shift everything you work on with studio magic into a live situation and can still prove you are a real band pulling off what you write every night on stage. The music is demanding and technical but I want to feel like I’m able to interact with the crowd and enjoy performing. I’m not there to put on a clinic every night. It’s all about going home with a smile on your face and that means both us and the crowd. That is my main aim on stage and I want to write music that sits into that setup.”

An album cycle involves a lot more than just the songwriting and recording process. To ensure they don’t fade away into the periphery, musicians are providing their fan base with an abundance of content to digest such as playthroughs, singles accompanied by music videos and documentaries of their journey. This is something Steffen wanted to take full advantage of this time round. “We decided we wanted to release four singles prior to the album and we thought about which songs could best represent this album. We decided on none of them! So we decided that we would take four songs which are the furthest away from each other and I think that raised a lot of eyebrows,” Steffen says. “The response has been very good and people are interested to hear the full release because they don’t have a clue what to expect. Because we can’t tour we decided to focus on bringing in a filmmaker who joined us throughout the entire process and we have produced a lot of studio documentaries to show the fans which was something new for us. It shows an entirely different side to the band, lots of smiling, laughing and having fun rather than it being strictly business so it was really cool. I think many fans probably have the expectations that we sit in front of a big piano writing scores all day but we just love to make music like everyone else!”

A Valediction is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

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