Dark – 09-06-2015

Interview with: Erik Molarin
By: Sabine van Gameren

The Swedish band Dark is ready for the release of their debut album. Just a few months waiting before the whole world gets to hear it , a digital release is coming up at 22 June though, but we spoke with Dark to find out about it already.

Who is Dark? They are from Sweden and a debut is ahead, but many may know these guys already. Both Erik Molarin and Jonas Strömberg have been playing in the band Beseech which called it quits in 2006. Jörgen Ström played in Skineater. The three of them were also playing together in the band The Mary Major.

To know how Dark started we asked Erik to tell us more about the years before, the time that leads to the release of the band’s debut album in September 2015. He starts telling about the time they had to put The Mary Major to rest for personal reasons to some of the band members. “I don’t see we will continue with The Mary Major anytime soon” he tells.
That happening it seems clear that it was not the end of their musical career after all for the three men kept together to make some music. “Me, Jürgen and Jonas we continued to make music anyway and the songs did not really fit The Mary Major so we started our own thing and that turned into Dark”.

But what is Dark? The album won’t be out yet, though the band posted a preview online for the curious minds to see what it is all about (https://youtu.be/lfQyTHoR6Ss). According to Erik all came back down to ‘dark’ which is why the name was adapted. He comments: “Everything had to do with the dark side of the mind, the dark side of life. It’s not really an optimistic title. Also, the lyrics are inspired by the dark side of religion. Everything is dark in the end, that’s why we chose it”.
Believe it or not, the darkness all started with one or two songs that the band created first. The first song the band created is called ‘Distance’ which they created about two years ago and they have been using it as a guideline to alter the album to. “We felt like that represented everything we wanted to do. After that song we had the vision that we had the right track, we just continued, followed our hearts on everything”, Erik tells. And when to line is said the band kept holding on to it.
The tweaking around and making some changes took the guys some time. It seem important to them to keep the red thread through the album relevant and somewhat obvious to the listener. While keeping that in mind they took the time they needed for it. “It has been a slow and thought-through process. Everything we done, we have been thinking about twice”, Erik comments.
Erik himself has been writing all the lyrics and to make that all connect that took some time as well, he tells: “Anything that happened in those two years in my life has been translated into song lyrics”, making it a personal story.

On the upcoming album the band also released a song in Swedish (‘Kvall’), something the guys wanted to for a long time, but the opportunity had never been there to fit one in. According to Erik it has been a strange experience to do so while being used to writing in English, but when the will is there it comes eventually as it seems. “We have been talking about making a Swedish song since the first The Mary Major album” he starts telling. “It always feels a bit silly to sing in your own language, but then I got the idea about the lyrics and how they supposed to fit to the rest of the album”.

Another surprise in this release may be found in the track ‘Sarol’s Song’, which is a rather long track. “We have never done a song that is so long” Erik tells us about this track. “We actually had to make it a lot a shorter, in the beginning it was like 18 or 20 minutes. We had to make it shorter because the computer could not process the length of the song. That’s kind of different as it changes a lot in the atmosphere in the song”.
Speaking of surprises, we were wondering what would be the most surprising thing for people when they are listening to the debut album of the Swedes. Erik has an elaborated view on that: “A lot of people will be kind of surprised that we are back into the gothic business after a couple years away from it. After we split up with Beseech I was kind of tired of the gothic scene, people’s reaction to songs and how people how people have some sort of formula of how they want gothic music to be in a certain way and if you would do any different people would get angry and whatever, I got tired of the whole gothic scene and that was why we left in 2006. People will be kind of surprised that we are back”.

Dark has told us some what to expect but for now the listeners can do with the before-mentioned promotional video the band has posted when they want to experience a little more. Keeping the tensions up for our readers we can only refer to a little quote by Moonspell’s frontman Fernando, to whom we spoke earlier: “The future is dark”. Unknowing (we assume), he may be very right about that but only time is going to show us that.

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