I must congratulate you on the album artwork. Although I have no idea where to put it, it looks great. Could you tell a little bit more about the concept behind it and the relation to the lyrical themes of the record ‘Phobos’, if there is any?
With this record, we kept everything in the same style and theme. Call it a concept album if you will. ‘Phobos’ of course means “fear”, and all eleven tracks represent one specific fear. To combine everything into one (cover) image was a bit of a struggle. In the end we decided to have ‘fear’ displayed as an irrational ‘feeling’, created by the mind. Everybody will experience fear in a different way, so we tried to display this as different elements in the person’s facial area. You’re actually looking at the fear below the surface. You see damaging, cut off pieces, iron gear and transparent parts. Indicate this as you want, as long as fear is on top of the mind. Transparent parts may be indicated as ‘trying to forget/push away’, the broken parts might indicate the ‘damage’ fear has on the physical and mental health of a person and the white eye might indicate ‘ignoring or not recognizing’ fear. Again, interpret the cover as you like. Just like the 11 tracks on the album, they can be applied to everybody.

That worked out really well, I could tell there was a bigger idea behind it, cool! You two founded the band, but the singer in the end is usually the lyricist and the one who therefore decides the main themes in a song. How do you work together with that aspect of keeping the band on the course you once set?

Lyrically, we tried to combine multiple topics. For example, Chira (track 5) is about the fear of being touched. We combined this with the story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and had his wings melted off. Apeiro (track 6) is about the fear of infinity, so we combined this with the story of the Russian soldiers in the Second World war who we’re forced to fight forever and we’re guided by this eternity. ‘Glosso’ is about the fear of speaking in public, and this is being represented as an instrumental track…

Sonja has always worked together with the vocalist to maintain the theme and concept of the album when it comes to the lyrics. As we always write the music first, we get a ‘direction’ to work with for the lyrics. With Sonja as the perfect link between the music and lyrics we made sure the lyrics were steered in the right direction. And to be honest, lyrically every piece of the puzzle fell in place automatically when the concept was set in stone.

Without the aid of a label, will it be harder to tour and promote the album you think, or was that something you arranged yourself anyways?
We thought it would be more difficult, but to be honest, a lot more doors opened for us now that we are doing this ourselves. We have been stuck in the ‘Label-Booking agency loop’ for years. Labels would say: “We can’t release it because you have no booking agency, and therefore no shows & sales.” Booking agencies would tell the same, only the other way around. Now that we took matters into our own hands and put in the hard work, we had labels reaching out to US to make a deal (of course we politely declined) and we even joined ‘Dragon Productions’ for our bookings. Promotion wise, yes it will be more difficult because it’s still hard for a smaller band to get a foot between the doors of printed magazines when you’re not with a label. But then again, we are reaching our fans via webzines, social media and, most important, the digital platforms. All and all we think this was the right choice for Dictated. We have now control over everything we do without pleasing a label or other parties involved. This gives you a lot of freedom.

You are always welcome, when you deliver music like this. Which is something we hardly talked about. There is a correlation between the music and the lyrics, as you said before, but was there a general direction or vibe you had in mind before writing?
At first? No. We started writing new tracks after the release of ‘The Deceived’ back in 2014 already, and we gathered a bunch of riffs and loose compositions. To be honest, we we’re struggling to come up with new ideas and music. But there was no rush at that time. When we came back from our last tour of that album’s promo cycle, things changed quickly. In 2016, we went to Nepal and India for 5 or 6 shows and it was the experience of a lifetime. The metal community there is absolutely fantastic. One of the most loyal scenes we ever saw. You see, it’s only been a few years since ‘being metal’ is legal over there. So not much has happened yet, and the entire scene is ‘new’. In some cities, we were even the first European metal band to set foot in the venues.

Unfortunately, this tour experience also caused us a lot of trouble. This might sound lightly, but at some point during the run, we have experienced fear like we never felt before. For example, when traveling, we have been driving through parts where women were not allowed, we were chased by motor gangs, ended up in car races through the mountains and had to bribe a lot of local police enforces. And also during our shows we experienced new and frightening things that would have never happened in European venues. Police would come in mid-show, with loaded weapons to stop you from playing. Power was turned off multiple times because some of the metal fans brought knifes into the pit…. When we got back, we were loaded with new experiences, and it definitely put down the basis of the new album. We threw away everything we had so far and started with a clean sheet. We dove into different influences and found Russian awesome instruments, old hidden records and it made us use additional instruments like keys, Sonja’s backing vocals and samples. After that, the concept was quickly made and everything fell into place rather quickly after we decided on the ‘Phobos’ theme.

And the balance between fast and slow, as fear requires all colors on the spectrum really, was that an issue you considered, or did it come organically?
You are actually the first one to really notice this! Yes, we did tried to balance our album between more straight forward blastbeat death metal and the slower tearing and nerve-racking songs. The musical direction shifted a bit when writing the new material. It isn’t something we thought of beforehand though, but it was something that occurred during our writing process. We started to see a pattern every time we grabbed our guitars to write some new songs. Sonja kept developing her tight riffing and staccato breaks, and Jessica kept on developing the floating lines and ‘feel’ riffs. Which in the end resulted in a bigger difference between the music/compositions we brought to our own studio.

Jessica would bring in riffs that were way too happy or far-fetched, or Sonja would bring in riffs that were way too long and staccato. It took us a while, but we found a way to work together with these newly gained inspiration. In the end, everything came organically and we knew how to combine both influences in the same song. It did give us so many different songs that all ‘felt’ different. We decided to embrace this fact and with the concept idea in mind, it all fell into place after a couple of long sessions of arranging the song structures. By the way, you will never know which guitar parts are Jessica’s or which parts are Sonja’s. After all these years we learned each other’s way of writing and/or we know how to arrange tracks with them. Hell, even we don’t even know any more which parts were written by who. They all melted together in these 11, very divers tracks.

I wish you all the best of luck with the release of ‘Phobos’. I will give you the honour of closing the interview down
Thank you guys so much for reading! It is because of YOU that Dictated is still alive and kicking. Next year will be full of shows and touring so come and say hi, have a drink and dance with us. Thank you Ramon for the opportunity to explain ‘Phobos’!