Powerwolf: In Wolves We Trust
With a career now stretching back some eighteen years, Germany’s POWERWOLF have in that time managed to position themselves as one of modern power-metal’s leading lights, thanks to a glorious run of werewolves-and-religion-themed albums that have only seemed to grow in scope and sonic power as time continues on. Now on the cusp of releasing their eighth studio album, Call Of The Wild, we at Distorted Sound Magazine were granted the chance to speak with guitarist and main songwriter Matthew Greywolf about the creation of said record over the last year and a half or so.
“I started actually writing music in the end of 2019, when we had stopped at least all European legs of the tour, but I would say we more or less exactly started really working on the album right when the first lockdown happened,” Greywolf explains to us via Zoom call of how the album got started. “We’d actually still been touring literally until the world went into lockdown – we played the last show in the middle of March 2020 in Mexico City and just came came back right when, you know, there were no flights going anymore. That South American tour was supposed to continue for one more week, which was cut down then. But apart from that we had just had the plan anyway to stop touring and start writing the album. And yeah, I have to admit being the main songwriter in the in the first month of lockdown, I felt, well, I mean; as bad as the situation was for everybody, I embraced the upside of being forced to do nothing but write the album.”
Of course, with the world forcibly ground to a halt, you’d assume the temptation would be there for a lot of bands to draw inspiration from the bleakness of the last 18-or-so months, though this was seemingly never on the radar for POWERWOLF, with the band instead choosing to separate their work from the darkness of reality.
“We as a band decided that we would refuse to let the pandemic have any influence on what the band was writing for the album,” posits Matthew. “We just refused that this would be the pandemic album or whatever, because I was very grateful that there was something like this project to jump into. Writing POWERWOLF music is escapism for me. It’s a world of churches and wolves and there is nothing else. And this time, I was even more grateful for that, because there was no pandemic in this world. But practically, of course, we couldn’t just meet in the rehearsal room and just jam or whatever. But since usually I’m the one who writes the basics of songs anyway, it was not that hard. The good luck is that I have quite a big house in the countryside, and I had the space where I could invite at least Attila [Dorn, vocals] to the house, and he had a room on his own, he could just be there and we had some talkback situation similar to a studio. So we could indeed do some corona-proof songwriting, and we adapted to that pretty well.”
That “different” setup mainly resulted in Call Of The Wild being perhaps the most diverse album in the POWERWOLF canon to date, with typically heavy ragers like the title track and monster-chorus-driven Dancing With The Dead sat alongside slightly more experimental fare like the Celtic-tinged Blood For Blood (Faoladh) and the band’s second-ever power-ballad, the soaring Alive or Undead (“I think that Attila really did one of his best performances ever on this song,” Greywolf states of the track). In creative choices like these, Greywolf and the band seemingly found new perspective on how they view their output. “I would say that we have accepted to think of POWERWOLF as more than just, you know, being defined as a power metal band”, he reveals. “Blood For Blood, for example – interestingly enough, I wrote that one, like a classical campfire kind of thing. It was really written on just acoustic guitar, some vocals, and I didn’t even think of it as a metal song. And that’s pretty much telling something about the songwriting approach. It was really like, let’s just write songs, whatever the songs are, once we play them with all the ingredients that POWERWOLF have, it’s gonna sound like POWERWOLF!”
Naturally, with a new record imminently set to be unleashed on the world, the next step (COVID-permitting at least) for POWERWOLF is to get back on the road for what they’ve once again dubbed the Wolfsnächte Tour. “Man, this is like asking a person lost in the desert about a first sip of water!” Greywolf laughs when quizzed if he’s excited to return to the road. “I mean, we’re desperately looking forward to getting back on stage. Ever since I started playing music when I was a teenager, I’ve never had such a long break from playing live. And really, I miss it a lot, but as well I really feel like on the other side, there’s no point in forcing things. It’s got to be safe, it’s got to be a good party for everybody. So let’s just keep fingers crossed and hope things get back as soon as possible. We are preparing for a tour, we’re in the middle of setting up the stage production and everything. All we can do as a band is be prepared and be ready.”
Given the band’s previous form for ever-increasingly extravagant stage shows, we of course immediately try and press Matthew on this further, and whilst cagey, what he hints at should have fans salivating. “Well, it basically will be, well, the next logical step, so to say,” he cryptically states. “I mean, if on the last tour, we had a church on stage, this time, we will have a cathedral on stage! We’re really expanding this. And we’re currently working on some you know, special moments, special scenes. Like we want to have the show where like, there should be some, like theatre-like moments in it”.
Our all-too-brief time sadly at an end by this point, we put it to Matthew to send a final message to you, the readers, and the result is optimistically upbeat. “Well, check out the album, you won’t regret it!” He states emphatically. “And well, keep your heads up – live music is going to return!”
Call Of The Wild is out now via Napalm Records.
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