Marduk‘s mastermind Morgan Håkansson had a chat with Carla Morton of Metal Wani about the current tour along Ragnarok, the new album ”Viktoria”: concept, album cover and the elements used in the album, the band being accused of a Nazi imagery, plans for the 30th anniversary and other touring plans.
On how the crowd is responding to the new song taken from ‘Viktoaria’-‘Werewolf”: “Overall is been very good, we chose to deliberate to make it bit confusion because it is probably the song that differs the most from the other albums, but it’s interesting when you release the first song to release one of them that is a bit different just to see people’s reactions but overall it’s been very good and we’ll release another song quite soon and also playing that 2 songs from the album on this part of the tour later on of course, but since the album 1st come out on 22nd June we only do 2 songs so far, we’re gonna do more later, a lot of touring coming up.”
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About the concept behind `Viktoria`, Morgan said: ”Is a continuation of the theme from `Frontschwein` , is a topic regardless WW2 again but in the music wise is a different journey but concepts like continuation of `Frontschwein` and the thing is when we started to prepare for this album we had three different concepts in mind, we had this one, we had one in kind of more spiritual and another historical part which was working a bit on but in the end we decided to go for the continuation of `Frontschwein` because that was the one that had grown most upon us and most ideas were most finished for and the other ones are still growing a bit so we’ll use these in the future”.
Asked further about choosing a simple cover for this album, the guitar player related that ”Yes, because of that reason , more and more covers becomes complicated, I think a lot of them are really messy. We wanted something instinctively cold, hard, a reflection of the spirit of the music and I think is reflective of the album: cold, hard, simple, you know is something that you remember more that all these messy covers you see with a lot of mixed up stuffs, is a good symbol of the album. ”
Morgan was also asked about the band’s incident in Oakland, being accused of a Nazi imagery and what does he think is going on nowadays: ‘‘I think people are too weak (laughs), I mean media and everything are looking for wrong and they are trying to be political correct so they should relax a bit I mean I don’t even think about it, if they want to create a problem is fine, I’m an artist, this fascinates me, I don’t have a problem with this, for me is not worst to do a movie about same subject so we keep doing what we are doing and what we believe in, I don’t care even if shows get cancelled or what they are trying to do…”