Interview by Kris Peters
German symphonic metal outfit Beyond The Black faced a daunting challenge after the standout success of their 2020 album Horizons.
The bands fourth album, Horizons saw Beyond The Black in more experimental mode, refining the best characteristics of previous albums Songs Of Love And Death, Lost In Forever and Heart Of The Hurricane but also introducing newer elements that reflected the bands growth.
Rather than repeat a winning formula, Beyond The Balck elected to further develop their sound by reintroducing the basic fundamentals of metal - guitar, bass and drums - and working them in with their existing sound to create an album that is a true reflection of a band at the peak of their powers but still with so much to give.
The result was so overwhelming Beyond The Black decided to lend their name to the body of work, which will be released on January 13.
Vocalist Jennifer Haben joined HEAVY to discuss the album in greater detail.
"I'm very proud, to be honest," she smiled, "because I think that this could be the best album we ever wrote. That is very good to say, right (laughs)."
We ask Haben why after five albums Beyond The Black have decided to lend their name to one of their albums.
"There are many things why we decided to do that," she offered. "First of all, this album was written in the pandemic, so we had a lot of time to think about some deeper questions. Many people out there in the world asked themselves deep questions, I know, stuff like where am I standing right now? Is what I'm doing right now what I really want? We did the same for our band. What is Beyond The Black? How do we sound? What do we want to talk about and all these questions. We always try to do that before every album and before writing songs but we never had the real time to go deep, to intensively think about it. This time we really had the time to do that before going into songwriting and recording, so we answered these questions and we're confident in what we think about our band at the moment. I think this is one of the reasons why this album sounds more confident than every single album before. It sounds like one piece. It sounds confident."
In the full interview Jennifer talks more about the musical make up of the album, the singles and how they sonically represent the complete body of work, the pressures of following on from a successful album, launching the next chapter of their career, touring plans and more.