In a new interview with Portugal’s Look magazine, guitarist Esa Holopainen and keyboardist Santeri Kallio of Finnish metal veterans AMORPHIS discussed their upcoming album “Borderland”, set for release on September 26 via Reigning Phoenix Music. Regarding how the process of making “Borderland” was different to the way AMORPHIS created some of its previous LPs, Esa said: “Yeah, it was the first album now that we did with a Danish producer, Jacob Hansen, and it was a very nice experience. We did three albums with Jens Bogren. He’s a splendid producer as well, but we wanted to sort of find some new nuances and elements to our production. So we switched over to a Danish producer, and Jacob was a great guy, amazing guy, and it was really nice to work with him. He’s a really easygoing guy, and he pretty much brought that extra little flavor, I guess, what we were looking for, to our sound. Creative-wise, I think we worked pretty much as we have before. Each guy works on their own with the songs and then we put all the songs to Google drive and the producer goes from there.”

Asked how AMORPHIS chose the 12 tracks to record for “Borderland” after coming up with 24 songs during the pre-production process, Santeri said: “Well, that’s one of the reasons why we use the producer… We self-produced ‘Far From The Sun’ and ‘Eclipse’ and ‘Silent Waters’ and ‘Skyforger’ and ‘The Beginning Of Times’, and actually making the albums was relatively easy, but we couldn’t agree… We had a lot of fights and disagreements about the bonus tracks and which will end up to the album and which will be singles and which order we have. And then we started to use the external producer in the circle with Peter Tägtgren. And I think the main reason to start to use the producer was that he makes the big decisions because we can’t really… There’s six guys in the band. Everybody has a strong mind, and we listen to all kinds of different music and we don’t agree about… and some songs are somebody’s babies, some songs you like because they’re heavy. And so the producer actually has to select the songs for the production from the 25-song pile, and then he has to select the songs for the album. And then he has to select a track list, like which order and the bonus tracks. So that’s one of the producer’s jobs in AMORPHIS, because we maybe could do it, but with endless fights.”