Poised to release their brand new album What Should Not Be Unearthed later this week, Nile are embarking on their brand new journey. Delivering a record that is decidedly their most punishing yet, whilst also ushering the band into the modern day. Set to tour the world over in support of the new record, the first stop will a European Tour. Nevertheless before that we were lucky enough to speak to Karl Sanders the band’s Egyptologist and guitarist extraordinaire about the brand new album, how the band got their name, what birthed the idea for the explanation of the lyrics in the booklet and of course whether or not they had ever been to Egypt!
From 4:50
So could you tell us about the artwork that he has come up with?
Well, I actually kind of dig it. It reminds me, in the Hellraiser movies there was a little box, a neat little puzzle thing.
Pandora’s box…
Yes, if you open it you know, Pinhead and all his evil buddies would come through from another dimension. So it would be best if you didn’t open the freakin’ box! Leave that box alone haha! Which is kind of like what he was going for with that mental association, or at least something similar, you know with What Should Not Be Unearthed. It definitely is, the meaning of the song, this would be better left unearthed! You should have never dug it up.
It ties in with the record and the title track and everything like that then?
Absolutely! When he asked me, “ok well what’s this title about?” I sent him the song lyrics and I wrote a few paragraphs trying to explain what it meant and what it was all about and he took those words and just kind of ran with it and brought it to life with his picture.
Fantastic! So how was the writing process as opposed to say, At The Gates of Sethu?
Well, I think that the sequence of events were similar in the fact we start writing songs we make demo’s and we go practice the songs. I mean that part is always going to stay the same but I think what is noticeably different about the writing this time is the mental approach, the place it was coming from. With this album it was very much focused on writing memorable kick-ass songs as opposed to writing songs with awesome musicianship. I think the last album suffered a bit from that, we were very focused on technical musicianship and capturing it very cleanly and having a surgical clean sound all that is well and good but this time we just thought about just doing something heavy, make the songs catchy and memorable and technique be damned!
You can listen from 7:20 onwards for the rest of the interview, as ever with all of our excerpts there are many different interviews all over our Soundcloud page which you can check out be clicking the link below!
Nile’s brand new album What Should Not Be Unearthed is set for an August 28th release!
