EX-KATATONIA MEMBERS REGROUP FOR DARK PROJECT
Melancholic Swedes deliver second album.
The revamped version of the nighttime project will release second album Pale Season on June 28 via Debemur Morti Productions. It includes the track Anti Meridian, released in 2017, which hinted at what to expect from Katatonia exes Fredrik and Mattias Norrman plus Jonas Sköld and Alexander Backlund of Letters From The Colony.
Referencing Porcupine Tree, Opeth and Anathema among others, the album is said to explore “those less-colourful patches of memory… all those moments lost in between the extremes of the emotional spectrum.”
“After Anti Meridian, Tobias Netzell and Nicklas Hjertton called it quits, and it took a while before Fredrik could put the pieces back together,” guitarist and vocalist Backlund tells Prog. He admits the Katatonia connection was a big part of his reason for joining. “Then when I got the songs, there was so much more. Most of the material was written before I joined, but this album is so different from the first. I think that’s because Fredrik wanted a different direction. I’d been expecting to do what Tobias had done, but the new direction gave me more creative freedom to do my own thing.”
Backlund believes new single Embers is fairly representative of the entire album. “I guess it’s the most standard one, if you can call it that – it’s a kind of 70s upbeat version of that Swedish depressive thing. Then we have Rotting Eden, which is like a super German track. Hound is written from the perspective of Cerberus, the hound of Hades. Meridian is me going crazy with effects on the riff from Anti Meridian, because I think it’s so beautiful. There are a lot of surprises.”
The members’ commitments with their other bands – the Norrmans are active in October Tide – means they’ve only played one live show to date, but Backlund says plans are being laid to tour. “We have the benefit of sharing members of October Tide; that’s a great package to offer promoters.”
Asked how he thinks the music might change when played live, he replies, “Well, I’m not going to sing as good! [But] it’s great music to play. The riffs are fun.”
Backlund says the total effect of Pale Season’s exploration of those forgettable-but-important moments in life is designed to be neither positive nor negative, but more “either/or,” noting “there’s a lot of melancholy in things that never were.”
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“It’s great music to play live. The riffs are fun.”