“The hour is coming. The hour is here.“
Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week Dobbin chatted to Dennis Fahlgren (bass) and Hilda Heller (vocals) of Blodet to discuss the release of Death Mother.
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Dobbin: We’re chatting about a month after the release of Death Mother. How are you feeling about the album a month after release?
Dennis Fahlgren: Kind of overwhelming. When we were recording and kind of living in these songs everyday, you kind of lose touch with what it’s like to listen to the songs. So it’s been a very nice feeling to be able to understand that people actually like what you’re doing. It’s a great feeling.
Hilda Heller: It’s always weird, you don’t know how people would react. And of course, we really like these songs, that’s why we recorded and released them. But we got some great reviews – we wouldn’t have minded if they were bad, but it’s nice, we even got a 10 out of 10. Surreal!
Dobbin: This is a significant record for you as a band as well, because it’s your first record without Rickie Östlund, who was previously a guitar player in Blodet before his passing in 2022. Could you talk a bit about that experience, maybe how it’s changed the band, and the music?
Dennis: The music on the album was pretty much written together with him, most of it, before he passed away. He had a tumour in his brain for about eight years. So I guess you can say his disease affected the sound of the band. But on the other hand, he was never in the band before he was diagnosed, so it’s hard to say if that made a difference or not. The songs on the album were recorded, I think, one month after his funeral. The music itself was written whilst he was in the band, so he put his personality and mark on the songs. So the songs themselves weren’t really influenced by his passing, but the recording was very much coloured by the mood, a kind of surreal feeling to not only lose one of your band members, but also one of your best friends.
Hilda: I think it also brought us closer together. In the end, Rickie really wanted us to see one another more and rehearse more, that was one of his last wishes. It’s really heart-warming that he wanted to hang out with us more. It really brought us closer together, and opened us up, being able to be more vulnerable with one another. I think that’s really good in music, you have to be vulnerable, you have to be willing to try new things. So it glued us together even more. And it gave us more motivation to keep going forward. We’ve just done a short tour with This Will Destroy You and The Ocean, and it really felt like Rickie would have loved this. So he’s still very much present in everything we do. And especially when we play, it feels like he’s still there, in a way.
Dennis: As Hilda said, even if he couldn’t be there all the time, he really pushed us to keep going. Whilst he was able to communicate and be himself, he really told us that, “no matter what happens to me, I want you to keep doing what you’re doing; I would be even more sad if you stopped doing this band because of me”. I know that in the last two months in his life, he had really severe dementia, so he was far from himself the last time I saw him. One of the things he said to me was that “the only band he ever wanted to play with was with you guys”, because he played with a million bands, but the only band that he kept holding on to, even though he was really ill, was this project.
Hilda: And looking back, it might not have been the best idea to record the album that close to his passing. But we really felt that we just wanted to be together, and other people around us did not really get what we were going through. So we just wanted to be together and play music, because that was our way to be close to him.
Dobbin: It’s really cool that you can look back at your achievements, your discography, and your live appearances such as ArcTanGent. You clearly achieved a huge amount with Rickie.
Dennis: We got permission from his parents to use a lot of his equipment for the recording. We made an active decision not to put his guitar and amp all over the recording. We selected certain parts and songs where we knew “this is how he would have done it”. His amp is still in our rehearsal space, where his guitar hangs on the wall. That felt important, even though he couldn’t be there. We did our best to copy what he would have done, as a tribute.
Hilda: We used to be three guitarists, but now we are only two. So I feel like it’s very important to us to not have to replace him, so now we play with two guitarists live, and it works fine. We just had to adapt. I’m grateful that we did not have to replace him, because that would have been impossible.
Dennis: That’s true, we realised pretty early that you can’t just replace the person. We’d rather play without than with someone else. I think he’s happy we did that. We also wouldn’t want to put pressure on a new member of the band, replacing someone who died. I don’t think that would be fair to anyone.
Hilda: I think it’s also affected our sound, because Rickie was…
Dennis: Wild!
Hilda: Yes, wild! He played in a special way.
Dennis: He didn’t use any effects, only the amp distortion, and he played hard. Hard as fuck.
Hilda: I feel like we have taken a turn, and become a bit more soft. We play more mellow songs. I also think that is an effect of him not being in the band any more.
Dobbin: If you go back to the first EP, some of the guitar work is really wild. It feels very different, instrumental focused; it’s a really interesting evolution for your band. I made a mistake in my review, counting the guitar-lines, thinking there were six people in the band, because of how separate and clear the guitar parts are in your work.
Dennis: We tried to make it sound like it was three people at the same time. We always recorded live in the studio; we have never done drums, then bass, then guitar, we always do the instruments live and vocals later. We then did a couple of overdubs with his guitar. I’m still shocked to think that this was recorded in three days.
Dobbin: Amazing, especially when you have a fifteen minute song…
Dennis: You don’t want to know how many times we rehearsed that song!
Dobbin: It’s such a great song. Structurally, you really feel each part coming, not a minute is wasted. All the time that is spent on the quiet moments is valuable. And it grooves, that must be you Dennis right?
Dennis: Sometimes! The thing about “Without/Within”, we worked on it for two and a half years before we recorded it. I listened back to one of the early versions we did in the rehearsal space, it’s got even more parts, and was five minutes longer. And it was horrible! The lyrics were different, there was another vocal melody, there was a lot of unnecessary parts and changes that we realised we needed to remove. We played it almost too many times.
Hilda: We worked on it a lot. I live two hours from the others, so I’m not always in the rehearsal space. I remember getting a recording that was fifteen, or seventeen minutes, and I was like, oh my god, what am I gonna do with this?
Dobbin: Having said all this, has it made the setlist?
Dennis: Yes, we’ve both made it the opening song (at our release party) which worked pretty well. On the recent tour with This Will Destroy You and The Ocean, we used it as the closer and that worked very well too. If you watched all three shows, which at least one fan of The Ocean did, if you know what to listen for you can hear small differences in that song, because it’s hard to keep track of how many times you play each part, and there’s a lot of interaction between band members.
Hilda: It’s such a dynamic song, so it works. I would also say that we have a brilliant guitarist in Elias. He surprises me every time we rehearse, he comes up with something different. He says it’s just because he is restless, but he’s amazing.
Dennis: Even songs we have played for a long time, he comes up with new stuff. It makes me say, why didn’t you do it like that the first time?!
Dobbin: I was delighted to see you get the support slot for the This Will Destroy You and The Ocean tour for the Scandinavian shows. I caught the London date, I’m a particularly big This Will Destroy You fan. I think that an audience that would see both of those bands is very likely to enjoy your music. Did the tour go well?
Hilda: This Will Destroy You were so good live. I was blown away. The tour was great. Playing at those venues was a big deal for us. We got to play to a lot of people, so hopefully we got some new listeners. Also, I would say one of the best things about the tour was that the bands and crew were so nice. I was surprised because you never know, when you’re the opening act, how they’re gonna treat you. But they were so welcoming and nice.
Dobbin: One of the things I love about Death Mother is the variety on the album; the first two songs are real singles, with real hooks, and they groove. “Lead Me Home” is lovely and quiet, then the epic “Without/Within” and the cool instrumental “93-22”. Do you have a favourite track on the record?
Dennis: I know which song I like the least, but I won’t tell you… I think my favourite has changed after this tour, because I’ve been quite tired of being called ‘post metal’ for the last three years. So rehearsing the songs that go into that realm, I felt a bit bad playing them. But after playing live, putting them together, plus a new song that is not recorded yet and is completely different, I have to say that “Lead Me Home” and “Without/Within” are my two favourites. I could put “The Hour” into that mix as well.
Hilda: It’s a hard question, it varies from day to day. I like the hopefulness in “The Hour” – ‘hang on, it’s about to change’, and I like delivering that on stage. “Without/Within” is a bit more challenging, vocally. So I enjoy singing that as well.
Dobbin: Lots of those parts are almost you singing alone, with the band completely silent. That must be special, to be the one in control of that moment.
Hilda: It’s powerful, but you feel kind of naked, I guess. But I really try to challenge myself and push myself.
Dobbin: Your performance on that track is fantastic. It’s interesting hearing you juggle feelings about being ‘post metal’. Looking at your playlists of your influences, there are lots of fantastic bands, but a lot of it is nothing to do with metal. And you’re sort of a metal label, and I guess we’re kind of a metal site. So I completely understand why you might be sick of hearing ‘post metal’, as a get-out-of-jail-free label.
Dennis: I don’t blame anyone for naming us post metal, but it does collide with what we consider ourselves to be. It might sound a bit pretentious, and perhaps it is at the end of the day, but we try to not to think about boundaries for our music. We’ll try anything. That’s why there’s five completely different songs on our album.
Hilda: We don’t really care about the genre people want to put us in.
Dennis: It’s human nature to categorise, so we’re fine with it.
Dobbin: I wanted to ask you about your experience with Church Road as a label. I think it’s a great home for your music, how has that been for you?
Dennis: They’re super cool. We met Sammy at ArcTanGent, Justine had a nasty cold so she couldn’t be there, but I email a lot with her. She’s super supportive, gets things done. They’ve been super stoked about what we’re doing from the start. What I realised in this process of getting signed by a label and talking to the industry is that we have the complete opposite view on everything, on just about everything. The industry standard is that you do a video with a performance part with the band, and you look into the camera, and stuff like that – I kind of throw up in my mouth when I think about us doing that. So we try to do things our own way. I’ve often doubted my abilities as a songwriter, the visual direction, but when I send them something, and I’m not sure about it, they come back with an answer straight away, saying that this is super-duper, keep doing what you’re doing. Which is great.
Hilda: They’ve given us a lot of creative freedom. I also want to say that, having Justine in the mix, feels great. When we did our three recent shows, I was the only woman on stage, and in the crew.
Dennis: In Sweden, we call it a ‘sausage party’.
Hilda: And, you know, when I got my period, I had no one to ask for tampons, or whatever. So it was not just a structural thing, but also a personal thing… There’s a lot to be done in that area, still.
Dobbin: Anything you’d like to plug at the end of our chat?
Dennis: I can give an update on what we’re currently doing. We have been writing songs since after the day we stopped recording Death Mother. We’ve not set a date yet, but hopefully we’ll be recording a new album before the summer. We have a rough outline of five or six new songs. I’m surprised at the kind of path we’ve taken on the new songs. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly – we’re painting with the same colours, but it’s different. Kind of scary too, because I don’t know if you’ll like our other songs. There’s one band in particular I’ve been listening to over the past few months, a Swedish band called Maggot Heart. That’s what I played most on the truck on tour.
Hilda: I’m really excited about the Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter record. I love the new Föllakzoid record, I listened to that a lot on tour. I also love that bands are back – It’s a big trend in the north of Sweden, as lots of kids, fourteen or fifteen, are starting bands and playing punk. I think there’s going to be some really cool music from these parts soon.
Dennis: When we had our release party a few months ago, there were, like, ninety percent teenagers in the audience.
Hilda: We had to have a sober event because one of the bands performing were so young!
In the full recording, you can find further discussion is about Blodet’s influences, how living in the far north of Sweden uniquely impacts their music, and their philosophy on terrifying verses easy listening music.