How do you look back at the writing process of ‘Endtime Signals’?
This time, when we started, it was me and Johan (Reinholdz – guitarist) who wrote the album. He lives in the south of Sweden, so when we started, it was going back and forth. I went to Malmö down to him and he came to Gothenburg. We went back and forth for about a year to try and see what we would make of this new Dark Tranquillity album. Of course it is always a bit scary period when you are about to write a new album. We all know that, in the end, it is going to be consuming all aspects of our lives till the end process. But as soon as we started I think that we were kind of clear that we wanted to do something that was looking to the future, but we still wanted to look back at the past as a band. In that way we also visited faster and more aggressive material. That became kind of apparent as soon as we started. Once you pick up a sound, no matter what it is, you are already in the process. So then we are leaning back on kind of our experience. That word may not be right, more the common history of the band, what we have done so far and try to be in that environment but still exploring new territories.

Yes yes. You did it very well. I like it a lot…
(laughs) Thank you! It is always hard when you write an album, because you are not sure exactly what you are writing until it kinds of take form. And at the end of the process, I have probably heard each song a thousand times. When you are done with an album, you are not completely sure what you have done, because you are so close to the material, but now that I have had a couple of months distance from it, I am really happy about it as well.

It is a lot darker than the ‘Moment’ album and of course that’s also due to Mikael’s lyrics…
I think it is a darker album and I think that’s what we were going through as well. We wanted to make a kind of statement album, something that has to be taken seriously. I think also that, coming out of the pandemic, which was difficult for the whole society and also after the pandemic we were hit by the war in Europe and we also have this polarized society that we are living in, that we not trust each other anymore. If you know Mike, he is an optimistic guy, he has a positive outlook on life, but it is hard to be optimistic these times and the lyrics are dealing with handling all those problems and fears about society, where we are going as humanity. Also that kind of stays within in the music, we kind of wanted to make something that was darker. We wanted to explore this territory. Melancholy and rage, but I think if I would draw a comparison with any of the older albums, I think this one shares some DNA with ‘We Are The Void’, which is also a dark album. That album is about death. We try to have a positive outlook on the future, but I think it is harder than before. If we just go back in our history four years, I think it is a completely different landscape from what we are living in today and I think we all have a responsibility to react to that, what we do through our music.

It is good to have a kind of catharsis and bring it out, because I guess that is also what everybody is feeling. If you just read the news or look around, you experience that the world is a lot harsher and darker than – let us say – ten years ago.
That is what we feel as well and I think writing music and listening to music or watching our shows is how we cope together with all these challenges. For me it would be weird today to make a very optimistic album, as if nothing is going on. There is so much going on, we need to take caution about how we can be moving forward. The next years are going to be crucial for where we are going.

How did you ever get into production work and recording?
I was always interested in the studio aspect of being a musician. That was what drew me into becoming a musician. The concept of creating, creating moods and creating atmospheres and creating songs. That’s why I got into music in the first place. So I always had an interest in working in a studio, even before I joined the band. But then, when I joined Dark Tranquillity back in 1998, they had a specific way of working that I had to adapt to, because I was new in the band. Back then you could say that Martin Henriksson was the producer, even if he is not credited. He was the one who kind of put the songs, took all the material and put it together. For ‘Construct’ Martin decided that he had nothing more in him to contribute and he wanted to end his musician’s role. They needed to have someone who took over that role. So on ‘Construct’ – even though I am not credited as a producer because we did not credit back then – so that is when it kind of changed and I guess maybe sound-wise it changed a bit, because we were experimenting a lot on ‘Construct’. That was the first album that we wrote in the studio. Before we were writing everything in the rehearsal place, sitting together, but now we started building the songs directly in the studio. It was still a long writing process, maybe a year that we were writing but we were doing it in the studio set-up. It is different for the creativity, because you don’t have to concentrate on playing, you record it and you listen. You listen and discuss the music together first. It becomes more like a group discussion and that’s how I like to do it when I produce. I think when I kind of took over – if you call it that – there was already a sound. Dark Tranquillity already had a sound and I think we had a vision what we are supposed to do in our group. I always try to kind of identify ‘what is it that we do uniquely?’, ‘what is the purpose of us making music instead of someone else?’, and we were talking about this before this album, especially when we had the member changes. What is a Dark Tranquillity song? We came up with the fact that we always are searching for a few emotions. What we identified as a DT song is that we are exploring this territory where melancholy is close to rage. There can be a melancholic song, there can be a song full of rage, but what we are doing is exploring these two emotions at the same time and that’s what I think is a DT song. Even if we start with a guitar riff, that’s not what we are searching for. First thing we are searching for is an emotion, something that moves us. When I hear something that moves me, something that resonates in me, then I enter this mood where I can say: ‘stop, I need to examine what we felt’. Why was this moment telling us something? We look at it from different angles and then we start working from that emotion and create a song from that. So it is a very emotional driven process and the process is really long because we allow ourselves to take time. We have the luxury of taking the time, because I own the studio. We can take as much time as we need. So this album was recorded in four months. It was the longest production we’ve ever had, but I think it was necessary because we wanted to – like I said before – we wanted to look forward and also we wanted to flash back from where we are coming from. We realized that we wanted to make this album very diverse. We wanted to visit this rage that we identified. This is the present and we also wanted to visit the melancholy. So we realized quite early that we wanted an album that could go from a ballad to the explosiveness of a song like ‘Unforgivable’ for example. We wanted to have this duality on the album. Once you have identified this, you have like a canvas. This is what we are searching for. It makes everything a little bit easier, because when you pick up a new idea, you can exanimate and say: ‘well, is this expressing anything of what we talked about?’ Is this emotion? Does it fit in what we want to say? I hope, even though a lot of members have changed within the band, hopefully the audience can still recognize the music as uniquely Dark Tranquillity.

You managed to do that. I love the contrasts. The first two songs are really harsh with rage, then on the other side we have the ballad ‘One Of Us Is Gone’ and the last track ‘False Reflection’ with its melancholic tinge… I also wanted to ask something about ‘Our Disconnect’, because that is a song in which you had a big role with electronics…
We talked about emotions before and I think ‘Disconnect’ is a raw emotion. We allow ourselves to take some time to discover it. We are not anxious to get really fast, we want to establish the mood and take this journey together with the listener. It is a different song, because it is moody and maybe thematically a bit more like a movie score. It doesn’t have a lot of hooks, but it has a lot of atmosphere, so we wanted to take the time to explore it. That’s what I like about this song. Maybe it is because there are a lot of keyboards (chuckles). Just because of that, it was also a song that I kept pushing later in the process, because I was not ready to sit with it yet. I had to kind of figure out ‘what are these emotions’ and how we may translate it. I allowed myself this time to discover the emotions without boring everyone. That was one of the last songs that we completed, because we needed to kind of figure out how to make it.