After the success of their most recent album Paradigm - which was their best received album of their career - Swedish melodic rock outfit Eclipse earlier this month released the follow-up Wired.
Frontman Erik Martensson joined HEAVY for a chat about the album, starting with the response.
"It's been fantastic," he beamed. "To be honest, I haven't seen a bad review at all, and I've read quite a few (laughs). We're quite overwhelmed by the reception from the fans who seem to love it which is the most important thing of course."
After the late success of Paradigm, it is natural to assume that even a seasoned band like Eclipse would feel some sort of pressure going into the follow-up, but according to Martensson that wasn't the case.
"Not really," he replied. "When you start writing songs, you write songs that excite you. You can make all the plans in the world about how an album should be like but in the end it's just you write the songs you like and that inspire you and that's what we did. I think the only thing that was important was that we shouldn't write songs that sounded anything like the last hit song, Viva La Victoria. We didn't want any song that sounds like that. That was the only thing that was important."
In the full interview, Erik talks about the band's success after so long in the game, why he thinks Paradigm resonated with so many people, their writing process, the cover art and what inspired it, the early days of Eclipse and more.