Hi Chris, the first thing that leaps to the eye, was ‘ah now Winterfylleth is on Napalm Records’…
Yeah, that’s right, a new label. After many, many years.

Indeed I am so used to Candlelight Records when thinking about Winterfylleth…
Napalm is interesting. We have been at Candlelight for a long time, but things have kind of changed over there. The guy who ran the label isn’t there anymore, Darren Toms. He left and I think our last album, our previous album, was the last release on Candlelight. They haven’t released anything else since then, so I think they are not focusing on that label anymore and I think the guys over there are just focusing on Spinefarm. It was the opportunity for us to move to a different label. So we inked a deal with the guys from Napalm and here we are! So far so good. They create good marketing things and they do good marketing with promotional material, they spend money on advertising. That is what a label should be doing. It feels strange that a label does that. It feels alien, because most labels are actually not doing that very well. There are lots of labels that just put people’s albums out on vinyl and then they hope to make some money. I think that the guys at Napalm are doing a really good job.

Let us focus on the new album now, called ‘The Unyielding Season’… The mid-part is awesome, with an acoustic song and big epics around it….
I think it is a good one. We definitely tried hard on this one. It had to be a good one: a new label, one new guy in the band now. Writing the music was fun, because there are good ideas coming from not just one person, but we are all kind of writing great stuff and I think that really helps you. Even though it sounds like a Winterfylleth album obviously, I think there is development, there are new areas, it is more aggressive, a little bit more keyboard this time. The album is definitely faster, it has a kind of peaks and there is a calm middle section that finally turns into blasts as well. So I think there’s some good stuff to discover.

Lyrics hold a surprise as well for me. I am so used to your historical approach and feeling small in the grandness of nature. Now it seems to be really dark. I think it is right to say that the former albums had a kind of ominous atmosphere, but now it is breaking loose…
That is true. I think that was the idea. We’ve got such a strange crazy world now and I don’t think this is only the perspective from someone living in the UK. It is a worldwide feeling. I can best relate to Europe and the UK, and a bit the US maybe. It just feels like the world is on fire I guess and that is the subject on the cover. We had this kind of ominous sentiment on the last album with the fog and the snow-capped mountain, but I think this time we wondered what is coming behind the horizon and now it feels like there are so many things thrown into the world. There are so many crazy policies, so many conflicts. There are different opinions in every country. It just feels like the world is this crazy, unhinged place right now. If you are a normal person living in that world, it is very difficult. I will speak about the specific things going on in the songs, but the general theme of the album really is that this world has a policy of bad decision making, raising people’s bills, where people are standing, it does not feel stable anymore, the world feels dangerous. There are clashes in our communities, there’s political unrest, left versus right, all these kinds of different things going on. Actually you just want to live your life, but it does not really feel that the world is ready for that at the moment. I definitely feel like we are in one of the most unstable and weird eras of history and certainly in my own lifetime or the one I am conscious of. I think it goes merely for everybody. There isn’t really a kind of left or right winged sentiment to any of this, it is just more a kind of human sentiment I think. So I like the idea that the wildfire is quite emotional and evocative. It is a powerful image that really kind of grabs you. I try to communicate how the world feels right now. Almost everyone I have spoken to, feels like this is the same for them.

The first song ‘Heroes Of A Hundred Fields’ should deal with brave people who gather for a kind of resistance to evil forces…to protest against what’s going on I guess…
Obviously if you have seen the video of this first single or you read the lyrics of the track, the sentiment of it is written like men going off to battle to fight against the enemy, but I think the real sub-story behind that is the enemy in this sense is bad ideas, policy making, the terrible people who are running the world right now and it is about brothers coming together, but what I mean by that is that people coming together. There are a lot of things put in the world to divide people into different groups, but we are stronger together. I surely believe that, when it really matters, I hope the people will put down their differences, because if I just think about a specific situation in the UK, recently, I think the government is not doing very well. They are talking about introducing this digital ID card for citizens. The idea was that you would need this kind of digital passport thing to be able to access services, to be able to go to a hospital, whatever it can be. It could be for anything was the point. They talk about it as if you can streamline everything and it is going to make everyone’s life easier, but if you think about these things it is more like China, a system to restrict people from travelling, restricting people’s ability to access services or shopping or whatever it might be. And so I think that lots of people in the country realize what it is really essentially for. It really feels like a really bad thing that’s going to be introduced. I think there’s maybe four million people or something in two or three days who signed an online petition. They talked about it in the parliament. Most issues got a few hundred thousand people wanting more information or whatever it might be and it is definitely one of the biggest things that has happened of that nature in a long time. And so I think when it moves masses, people can come together. It is just annoying, from the perspective of someone talking about the social aspects of these kind of things. People should do that about more things. I am worried that the government just talks forever and put all these little things in the world all the time. It is just taking away people’s freedom and it is taking away the ability to live happily and to know people in their community. Whatever it may be, that’s why I called it the unyielding season, because it feels like a way to control everything, it is unrelenting, it is the season now. It almost feels like the open season for this way to all this craziness that’s coming in the world. So I think it has got a real strong concept, this album. I think the songs are all kind of based on that. A Concept. You live in the world as well, these things are affecting us all. You are feeling these things, they affect your life. I think we all felt compelled to write about that.

That is smart, because people follow like lemmings with every new gadget. That is how they look at it, even if it destroys your privacy. I am still of the generation that doesn’t change for a change but goes on with something that’s working good…
Not all progressiveness is progress. And I think everybody feels that, no matter where you are living or how old you are. All of our albums are a kind of moments in time, a reflection of the last two years. Every few years I sit down to write one and in some ways, they are the music we want to make but they are also about some of the things that’s going on in the world. Older albums are more about the old history and some tales and how people still fight the same battles, in ancient times just as they do now. There’s still wars, there’s still conflicts, there’s still division, but now it feels like such a burning social issue. I think the lyrics are a bit more direct this time. Like you said in the beginning, less historical references, but more about real world things that are happening now. Definitely.

I also like the fact that you have written a song, ‘Echoes In The After’, about the 200 years old tree that was cut by vandals. We are talking about the Sycamore Gap tree or the Robin Hood tree. I’d like to know more about that…
That will be our second single, which comes out tomorrow. There will be a video for it, out tomorrow. The song is called ‘Echoes In The After’, it is talking about the aftermath, what happened when that famous tree was cut down. I used to think about it for a long time. Perhaps you remember our acoustic album in 2018 where we had a painting of that tree on the front cover. It has been something that we have used in our own artwork and Mark Deeks, our keyboard player, he is from that part of the country. So it is an important one, it is an important cultural symbol for people and it is one of those things that is very recognizable for the region. Obviously it is a tourist attraction and it is has been famous for being filmed. It is a nice thing in the landscape, a part in the history and culture of the Northeast in England. So when it was cut down, it just fell like this strange premeditated weird thing to do. And nobody could understand why these guys did it. Was it to destroy some kind of ancient symbol? Was it political ideology? Was it just some guys who were drunk and being idiots? Whatever it was, it sort of prompted us to write a song about it. So I wrote the song and it is based on an old poem of this book ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’ from Sir Philip Sidney. It is written like nature is talking to itself, nature as a kind of person, talking to itself. So imagine if the tree is like your arm or your hand and cut off by something. It is like nature is reacting to a part of itself being missing or to missing an arm, missing a limb, an elemental loss. In some ways it is directly about what happened in Sycamore Gap, but it is also about this kind of self-spirited nature kind of talking to itself. I like the idea of combining the real world with the old England folklore where you had the green man. The green man is the idea of giving a personality to nature. Nature as a character. So I guess it is almost like the green man kind of talking to nature as a person.

Interesting!
We had this 2016 album ‘The Dark Hereafter’ and the song ‘Green Cathedral’. That song is about how nature can almost be like replacement for a church where you can find all the spiritual enlightenment and the aura and the spirituality just by standing on a mountain top and feeling the wind in your face. Just like some people find in churches. It is almost like saying you don’t need religion, you need a kind of call of nature.

Heathen religion was based on nature…
Yeah I guess that’s the point. The new religions are not really about that, they forgot about that aspect of the world.