Orbit Culture: Finding Their Formula
Lineup changes can either make or break a band. Some regroup and come out fighting stronger than ever and unfortunately some do not acclimatise well to such a transition. Swedish melodic death metal outfit ORBIT CULTURE have had their fair share of chopping and changing throughout the span of their career thus far but the last remaining original member and frontman Niklas Karlsson has taken it all in his stride.
“I’ve been the sole writer for the band since our second album Rasen in 2016. It’s been my baby since then and before that it was kind of a small hobby. Richard [guitars] and Frederick [bass] came into the band and brought in a lot of much needed drive to the band. When we released the video for Sun Of All I believe that’s when things really started to heat up in the underground metal community and the train has been rolling ever since then.”
Since this release the band has gone from strength to strength, building up their following and it is now time for the band to release their eagerly awaited third full length effort entitled Nija. “It’s going to be quite a hybrid package for sure,” discusses Niklas. “The harder parts are heavier but we’ve also experimented with softer parts too. I think the dynamic range on this album is quite different from what we have done in the past. Big choruses and big riffs! I think we really found our own formula on our Red Fog EP and we wanted to continue down that road. I’ve learned to sing a bit better and utilise the ‘Hetfield‘ style vocals so this release will be more of a refined version with a similar recipe. I just wrote what I felt was cool really. I’m one of those guys who pretty much deletes most of everything I do so I didn’t write too many songs. I recorded everything for this release at home, getting all the demos to the stage that they were basically releasable if you can call it that.”
ORBIT CULTURE are a band that aren’t afraid to display admiration to their influences whilst also adding their own spin to create anthemic hooks and devilishly addictive material to produce one of the most exciting listens that the melodic death metal genre has witnessed in quite some time. “ORBIT CULTURE is kind of a combination of all the music I’ve listened to for the last 10 years like GOJIRA, METALLICA, STATIC-X to name a few,” explains Niklas. “I tend to listen to a song and get inspiration from certain elements and see how I can adopt that. I feel like that’s the secret sauce of our sound these days. We just pull everything together and kind of make it up as we go along!”
To coincide with this album the band have released a string of videos which follow a similar conceptual narrative relating to battling with internal struggles and overcoming such an illness. “We did a lot of work on how we wanted to visually present the album. We wanted to do something bigger from a conceptual perspective instead of videos of us playing the songs,” states Niklas. “We brainstormed a bit too much and actually went out of our initial budgets! When we got further into the process we came up with the metaphors, the imagery and everything kind of grew from there. The exposure which has stemmed from these videos has been huge and we’ve received so much recognition from people and we’re really thrilled that we’ve been allowed to experiment with stuff and everyone seems to dig it. We’re really proud with how the whole album has come together. One of our pre-order packages sold out within two days!”
Whilst bands all over the world are still playing the waiting game wondering what the coming months will bring with regards to possibilities of touring, Niklas is staying particularly optimistic on the matter. “We were in talks with Avocado Booking to get something booked at the beginning of next year so hopefully that gives us something to aim for. As we approach the fall and winter periods we are looking at potential reissues of the albums, maybe getting some vinyls together to keep the fire going so it’s a very exciting time for us. All we can do is strive on.”
Nija is out now via Seek & Strike.
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