My first question to Watain frontman Erik Danielsson was going to be ‘Have you ever wanked over an image of Christ and then consumed your own emissions?’ but being a trained journo, I knew to save the hard questions till later in the interview.

Erik’s currently in an art studio, in Stockholm, Sweden; what’s he doing there, I hear you ask. Well, “…it’s the dead of fucking winter, and I’m finishing up the last touches to our backdrop for the
upcoming tour.”

I understand that metal madman Morbid is doing some stuff for the Brisbane Crowbar gig? “Yeah, yeah! He’s doing some stuff for us too. From what I heard the Brisbane venue is pretty small so we need a smaller backdrop for that one. The one that I’m doing is fucking huge! We’ve been working a lot with Morbid in the past, and the club in general; they’ve been extremely helpful. Those guys are fucking awesome – they’ve been helping us out a lot.”

So you’ll be hitting our shores in a couple of weeks but first you’ll be touring South America; Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia. I make a point of accentuating Bolivia with all its connotations, and Erik chuckles mischievously. So are there parts of the globe that you particularly enjoy touring? “To be honest, in a way this is like the ultimate tour for us because it goes through areas where we’ve only ever had great experiences. Both Europe and the US can be a bit up and down – you never really know on what level things will go or what kind of response you’re gonna get – but these three territories; Australia, South America, and Asia, we’ve only ever had really fucking wild and good experiences. So I think this is kind of an ultimate tour for us – long as fuck, probably one of the longest we’ve ever done – but that’s what we’re here for.”

We discuss the highs (and lows) of touring, and he reflects that “I enjoy performing a lot, and I enjoy the fact that every night you perform in front of different people or in different circumstances, and the fact that it always remains a challenge. We’ll never become a band where every night is the same show, one after another. With a band on our level, which is relatively underground in
comparison to a lot of other bigger metal acts, I think we’re touring in a way that is still exciting and still provides a bit of a challenge, and that’s the part that I like the most – apart from record hunting and raising hell.”

I mention that the live shows seem very ritualistic with the use of blood and candles, and he seems to get a touch evasive, carefully choosing his words. “I think that sometimes I feel that it’s been a bit over-dramatised but I think that what we’re doing is a very traditional black metal live show in a way, but over these past twenty years since we’ve been a very active band when it comes to touring, we’ve had the opportunity to delve in to what that actually implies, what that live situation implies, and how you can work with it in order to make it even more relevant and fucking powerful. We found that the way of doing that is by approaching the live show as a ceremony rather than just a regular rock and roll show. It’s not a completely unique thing; it’s something that we’ve refined and made into our own thing and the basis of everything is still the same as any rock show but our approach to it is more of that of a magician, or that of a pilgrim who is celebrating together with his kin.”

And do you think the audience is celebrating the same thing as yourself? “Yeah, I do. When they are celebrating, I think we’re celebrating the same thing. What we’re there for is to give them a
sense of power, a sense of freedom, a sense of the diabolical reality that we’re a part of, and I think that those feelings are usually what I see reflected in other peoples’ eyes as well. I’ve said it many
times, but for me there’s no need to go into any detail about exactly what is going on on stage. The most important thing is to be caught in the storm that is coming out of it, and join the celebrations. If you feel inclined to do that then I think we’re definitely celebrating the same thing. People call it by many different names but I definitely think that people are there for the same cause, for the love of the same thing.” Mysterious – he’s definitely up to something…

Switching topics; I cannot believe The Wild Hunt was released over five years ago. “Yeah! Fucking ages!”

And now Trident Wolf Eclipse has come out, and I note that the band has gone back to its previous harder sound, what was the motivation? “I think the more that I look back on those two albums, I mean Trident Wolf Eclipse is a year old now, and the more I look back on the whole thing with those two albums, is that The Wild Hunt was a really heavy album to make, it was a fucking epic recording session, it was an epic writing session, and it was a pretty fucking overwhelming album to work with. It turned out exactly how we wanted it, and it was a way for us to make a point like ‘Hey, we’re gonna do exactly what the fuck we want with this band so don’t think anything else’ and when we began writing the latest album I think we were not really that interested in over-thinking things, we were not interested in those heavy, over-powering fucking recording sessions. We were interested in creating something that just had pure force, pure fucking diabolical power, and that related a lot to that same feeling that we have on stage, and even when touring on The Wild Hunt. The stage is always a place of predatory instinct, of fucking fire, of whirlwind force, and I think we were more interested in those kinds of atmospheres this time. Now we’ve done that and we’ve been touring with the album, and naturally it was kind of built around a live feeling, and naturally it’s been a very good album to tour with. Whatever we’ll do next, I wouldn’t be surprised if we did an album that was closer to The Wild Hunt – I don’t know – for me it’s not about shutting or opening doors, it’s about doing what is relevant in the moment, and with Trident Wolf Eclipse that’s exactly what it was.”

We start reflecting on the contradiction that is black metal; it can be pantomime and classical, Wagnerian yet pompous. Erik agrees. “‘Wagnerian’ is a good word… I think it’s a very important
quality of black metal and I think most people agree on that. I can hear that in even the most primitive underground fucking black metal.”

I mention the delightful sub-genres such Aztec black metal and country black metal, and his silence tells me that he’s not a big fan of such frippery. “For me personally, my taste in black metal has always been quite traditional, and to be honest I don’t really follow much of these new interpretations or takes on black metal. But that has more to do with personal preference than whether I respect it or not – I respect any musician that makes fucking powerful music and puts it out there.”

So the trident, wolf, and eclipse; as recurrent Watain symbols, what do they mean for you? “I think they are three of the symbols that sum up the idea of the band the best. We’ve been using them as our central symbols…and they represent our universe. Why we picked those specific symbols, I could get very deep into that but I’ll just say that individually they all have qualities that reflect the band very much. To put it simply, the wolf represents the brotherhood of the band, the outlaw aspect of the band, the way we encounter our foes and the way we encounter the world in general is from a wolf’s perspective. The trident, I would say, is our weapon, it’s our magickal weapon and our physical weapon as well, it’s the means by which we work, it’s our tool…”

And there are three of you in the band? “Yes, exactly, and the number three is something that’s been recurring in the Watain universe since day one so when we took the trident as our symbol that
had a lot of relation to the number three, and finally the eclipse could be seen as the result of our work, the magickal aspect, the unnatural and abnormal, the abomination that’s lurking behind
everything we do; the nameless force. The anomaly that comes out of working with these types of things over a very long time. That’s a brief explanation of those three symbols, why we put them in
the title was simply because we wanted, after twenty years, people have all these conceptions of you and they have all these pre-conceived notions of you, and for us it’s important from time to time to define who we are. To explain that ‘Hey, this is our universe, these are our symbols, this is what they are so let’s gather around those instead of other things because this is who we are’”

We agree to sit down in the future and discuss occult symbolism further. The band delight in straight forward yet twisting titles, for instance 2013’s The Wild Hunt. “There is this thing with The Wild Hunt title, a curious fact that I’m not sure that a lot of people know, we talked about The Wild Hunt as our Blood, Fire, Death – you know the Bathory album? We kind of approached it like that in certain ways and the cover of Blood, Fire, Death is a painting, and the name of that painting is The Wild Hunt [the full title is The Wild Hunt of Odin by Peter Nicolai Arbo – Whallop! Art fact, right there] and that’s one of the reasons why we started thinking about that as a title. I love that title; it still resonates really fucking strongly with me. It’s a beautiful, and great
fucking title, for a metal record.”

I note that Hakan doesn’t play drums live anymore? “That’s right. Since 2014 Hakan decided that he didn’t want to tour any more, and you hear a lot about bands going through stuff like that with members who grow tired of playing live, and I’d never been able to understand how bands go through those issues but because of the way the band was built up – it was built up by three friends who have been very close since we were sixteen years old – for us it was not a difficult transition at all. Especially since Hakan already had a live replacement in mind in Emil (Svennson, of Degial) who’s been touring with us since 2014. It was a very good transition and Hakan was there at all of the rehearsals when we started playing with Emil. Again, it’s only for playing live so Hakan is still writing a lot of music, he recorded all of the drums for Trident Wolf Eclipse, and we stay in touch every day so it wasn’t a negative game-changer, it was just a thing that needed to happen at that time. He likes his deep dark woods up in Sweden and he likes his solitude and he likes only to have people around him that are like him, and we completely respect that decision.”

It’s a beautiful arrangement. “Yeah. I can’t say how grateful I am for that whole thing; the way it went when it did, like I said, you see a lot of bands go through the same thing and it goes to shit…”
We’re having a lovely chat but I realise my time is nearly up. So have you ever wanked over an image of Christ and then consumed your own emissions? He laughs. “Not consumed, I’m not much of a sperm eater – I leave that to the romantics in black metal.” So you’re not denying wanking over a picture of Jesus? “Well…maybe in my explorative years!”

Erik. Trafficker of Demons and all round blasphemer. A nice bloke. See him and the guys on tour soon.

Like Albert Said, you can catch Watain at the following venues in Australasia:

Friday, 22nd February
Max Watt’s, Melbourne, AUS

Saturday, 23rd February
Crowbar, Brisbane, AUS

Sunday, 24th February
The Factory, Sydney, AUS

Monday, 26th February
Valhalla, Wellington, NZL

Tuesday, 27th February
Galatos, Auckland, NZL