Over the weekend that we were there it became more and more apparent that the variety of bands that were on offer from the festival ranged far and wide all over the metal spectrum. From the household names of Trivium to the rising stars of our time. With this being Conan’s first time performing at Catton Hall, the band were about to deliver their signature Herculean Doom Metal riffing to the metal loving masses.
So has having your own studio, changed your outlook a little bit on the songs at all or how they are produced?
Well Rich, our drummer who is standing over there actually lives down in Cardiff so it’s obviously a mission for him to come up to us up in the northwest. So we kind of have band practice every sort of couple of days a week. He’s got a five hour drive up and then a five hour drive back home again. What he does is he will come up for a few days, in between sessions, gigs and tours and we will just have an intensive block of writing. Which is how we have done this album and because we’ve got a studio as well we can just record it once we’ve got the demos into a structure. Listen to it, digest it, rather than just do the traditional thing and just slog it out in a practice room over and over again. I think it’s worked out pretty well you know, because we’ve got a studio there’s slightly less pressure.
I can imagine that you can be a bit more flexible with how you want to do stuff. Is there any sort of new techniques that you might be trying out?
Song wise? Yeah I mean, the stuff from Rich, even though I have been in the band for like nearly two years this is actually our first recording that we’re playing on. I say that the elements that we bring as musicians to the band are different anyway. To the previous musicians, so it’s the same band! John is the main song writer and the sound of the band with his voice and guitar but I would say overall the new album is a lot more aggressive than previous stuff it’s got elements of sort of super slow stuff to fast stuff. There nothing really light on the album!
That’s what we like to hear!
Before they collectively annihilated the crowd at Bloodstock however we were able to speak with Chris Fielding. Among other things we chatted about some of the influences that the band felt they had, what exactly is going on with the new album and whether or not their band name translates to the lyrical themes they scream about!
Conan’s new album is set for a release early next year, listen to the interview for full announcement!
