Fight For your Rite
Switzerland’s Samael are celebrating their third decade, but they’re still determined to evolve – and to take on global tyranny while they’re at it
Having made the switch from their original black metal sound towards more industrial realms with their 1995 album, Passage, Switzerland’s Samael have always had an element of grandeur to them. But if you find yourself wondering why their 11th album, Hegemony – one that marks a 30-year milestone – sounds like it’s taken on an extra dimension, at once more imperious than ever before but with a viscerally purposeful bite, there’s a crucial line in the album’s pounding, Valkyrie-stormed final track, Helter Skelter: ‘The world of today has a new shape’.
Having traditionally dealt with more abstract occult and spiritual themes in the past, frontman Vorph felt he could no longer ignore the social and political turmoil raging across Europe and beyond. When spirits are being crushed, they’re going to be left with an imprint, and rather than unleash a set of diatribes railing against higher powers, Hegemony’s huge, symphonically-laced anthems sound as though they’re mapping out the sweep of history itself. It lighs a beacon that should fire up fans on Arch Enemy’s forthright odes to empowerment as well as of the Teutonic, territory-conquering stomps of Laibach and Satyricon.
Sitting in the elegant olde worlde Napalm Records offices in the heart of Berlin, Vorph explains why it was never a conscious choice to shift his focus: “It is the first time we’ve been very much connected with the zeitgeist,” he says. “A lot of time in the past, once we are around the creative process, we’ve pretty much isolated ourselves from everything, and we kind of don’t know what’s going on elsewhere. Somehow today, you cannot do this anymore. The news is already on your phone, it’s everywhere.
You cannot distance yourself, it’s running after you.”
Hegemony’s opening title track could equally be a mimicry of the New World Order mindset and a call for an army of resistance, but rather than just add to the roll call of bands calling out the powers that be, the album is above a call to action, its overriding theme of unity and community – not least on the nail-your-colours-to-the-mast track, SAMAEL – as a force that’s greater than the sum of its parts. As Vorph explains, it’s a macrocosm of personal experience.
“I’d always wanted to use a title based on the band name for a long time,” he says, “but I’d never found the subject that would work with it before. I wanted to explain what Samael is as an entity, to say what it means for me. There is an energy going through this band, and there are moments when we are more than four people – that what Samael is all about for me. And extending this to a live environment, if you have a great show, and you have this unity. It may just last for that moment, but it is a continuum, and this is what this song is all about, about that connection, and that sense of belonging that exists outside of the mainstream.”
Ask Vorph about where he feels Samael stand in the canon of symphonic metal, however, and it’s clear that they’re determined to cut their own path.
“For me, I would not like to have the symphonic element taking over too much space. It’s an important element of what we are doing, but it has to be counterbalanced by other things. What I like about what [songwriter, keyboard player, drum programmer and Vorph’s brother] Xy is doing when he composes is he never goes too much over the line, because melody can become very cheesy very soon. There is a fine line, and I like dissonance and noise more than he does, but I need to have those elements.
“I like classical composers like Stravinsky for example,” he says of the Russian composer whose 1913 ballet, Rites Of Spring, started a riot on its debut performance. “His music is rhythmical, but dissonance is very much a part of it. The track Rite Of Renewal on the album is very much central in its theme, but it’s a testimony to him, too.”
As much as it’s a new step up for Samael, Hegemony feels very much bound to the band’s past as much as to their future. Black Supremacy’s palpitating, titanic groove is a reanimating of their black metal roots into the body of a Transformer – but above all, it follows more than one period of reflection on where the band have been.
We revisited old material when we toured [1994’s] Ceremony Of Opposites recently,” says Vorph. “Of course, some of the songs were in our regular setlists anyway, but some we forgot about, and to reconnect to this, and the album as a whole, I understood something about myself. I was at a bit of a dead end at that period, and 20 years on, you feel more relaxed, like, sure it was tough, but I’m still here. It was a good feeling, even though it was relating to a darker part of my life, but you relate to it in a positive way, strangely enough.”
Samael albums, by design, haven’t followed a predictable path, 2009’s dense, aggressive Above following the more sweeping Solar Soul, for instance. As Vorph says, “We’ve evolved. If your life is linear, it’s not going to carry you anywhere.” But while Hegemony is more sonically bound to its predecessor, Lex Mundi, than any two chronological Samael albums have been, it feels like a clearing of the slate and a glimpsing of new horizons.
“Lux Mundi was an album where we tried to condense things together,” Vorph explains,
“to make sense of what we’d done before and find our essence. This album, we built upon that one, and we said to ourselves, let’s take it to the next level somehow. When Xy started to compose the music on Ceremony Of Opposites it changed and forged our identity, and from then on we’ve developed it here and there, exploring different directions and going back to the core of what we are. I think we’re pretty much centred at the moment. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, ha ha ha! But I feel it could be a jumping-off point.”