GRIMM: Are you one to pay attention to reviews at all?

I do, yeah. I do pay attention to them but, in the case of bad reviews, I don’t let them bother me because I believe that everybody has the right to their own opinion. Even if I might disagree with points they make to justify it, it doesn’t matter. If someone does a really shitty review, I would shake their hand. I’ll say “good for you”. I know that might seem a bit absurd to some but life’s too short to get that angry with people. What, are you so precious that everything you do should be loved by all? The world doesn’t fucking work that way. So I’m completely relaxed about all this.

GRIMM: You guys didn’t deem it necessary to postpone the release despite the arts and music business having fallen into this deep a crisis due to the pandemic?

No because we’ve actually been waiting a long time to release it and didn’t want to put it off any longer. It’s not like people were screaming at us to release the album. Of course they were asking for it, but it’s not like they were shouting at us. To be perfectly honest with you, many bands are postponing their releases, and we just didn’t feel like doing that. We don’t see how it will be less beneficial for us, even if the touring doesn’t start straight away, for this album to be out there. In the end we’ll get to tour, whenever that might be. The album will still be the album. Period.

If you want, you can look at it this way: if a significant percentage of other bands postpone their album, it’s only gonna help us surely in some bizarre ways. Yet it has to be said: somebody that buys a Barry Manilow album, who’s postponed his release, is probably not gonna reach for Napalm Death as the next best thing. Although, there are stranger combinations of taste within people

GRIMM: True enough. Whenever I’m done with Napalm Death, I put on a David Hasselhoff record. Tastes vary, I guess.

Now I understand your new record’s been in the works since 2017?

Shane recorded the initial fifty percent of the tracks in 2017. Him and Danny recorded it. But you gotta remember we were dragging our heels. We were doing a day here, a day there, and then maybe nothing for two months. That’s why it took so long. Not only were we touring like fucking crazy, but the producer had a lot of other projects going on. We like to be fair and respect his schedule as well, so we worked around him. And it worked out all right.

GRIMM: Are the songs that were written back then still as relevant now as they were three years ago? And I mean that in a sense of subject matter, just as much as musically.

Oh yes. Shane had an overview of what he wanted to do. As a consequence there wasn’t any difference in context because of the time. He always had the general plan of how everything was gonna shape up. Same goes for me concerning lyrics.

GRIMM: So you both had a clear idea of the concept?

More or less. Obviously we are a band who like to use a lot of spontaneity and improvisation at times. So we have to tweak stuff of course. But in the main we had definite ideas, yeah. In terms of the album’s concept the subjects were kind of peaking at that point.