In a new interview with Mark Kadzielawa of 69 Faces Of Rock, drummer Fred Estby and guitarist David Blomqvist of long-running Swedish death metallers DISMEMBER spoke about the band’s current reunion, which began nearly six years ago. Regarding how he and his bandmates decided to return to playing live shows,  Fred said: “I moved to the United States in 2016. I toured — I’m a sound engineer, so I did a lot of front-of-house jobs for other bands, touring with other bands. And people sometimes came up to me and would be, like, ‘Are you Fred from DISMEMEBER?’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah, why?’ ‘You guys should tour again. You guys should play again.’ And I’m, like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ People say that and they don’t really mean it. But after a couple of years, like around 2017, I was, like, ‘Oh, maybe there is a real interest that is big enough for us to maybe think about playing together.’ And we were not all on the same page then, but we let it go. So we kind of forgot about it. But then around 2018, we started getting real offers to do festivals and so on. And people were actually saying that, like, ‘Whatever you want, whatever you need within reason, we want you to play.’ So, we finally got on the same page, all of us, and we were, like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it again. Let’s see how this goes.'”

Asked what he and other members of DISMEMBER are doing differently now that they didn’t do before, Fred said: “We do not do any long tours. We don’t do more than two shows in one weekend. If we start touring again, you’re gonna start seeing the bad sides of being away from your family and your home and your work, and you can’t take off from work. We all have careers that we don’t wanna give up. So, that’s number one. Number two is that we promised each other that any show or any decision that we do for the band is gonna be — everybody has to be in, all five of us. If that’s not happening, then it’s not gonna happen. And number two was that we said that if it’s not fun, we shouldn’t do it. We need to know that we’re having as much fun as we did when we started out, so that we’re laughing, there’s more positivity than negativity around the shows we’re doing. That was really important to us. And that’s why we keep it like this. People are, like, ‘Oh, you should come tour.’ Or, ‘If you could be on the road instead, we could pay a little less for you guys to come play. And then you can play more shows and all that.’ Yeah, but that is the problem. Then you start compromising on your own terms. So we’re never gonna do that. We’re never gonna tour. If we play more than two shows in one week, that’s gonna be very rare, and it has to be very special. Otherwise, we keep it like this. And that makes it fun for us, for the audience, and we also know that there’s gonna be good quality for all the shows that we’re playing.”

As for the possibility of a new DISMEMBER album, Fred said: “Yeah, I mean, we have material already. We’re talking about making an album. It’s just a matter of when and where and how, because we don’t live… I live in the U.S, Richard (Cabeza, bass) lives in Belgium, the other three guys live in Sweden still, so we just have to plan it out well. And also we’re still getting offers to play around 10 shows per year, which is what we can do. We can’t really do much more than that per year. So as long as those offers keep coming in, then it’s kind of hard to say no to that just to record an album, because we also wanna play live. So I guess we’re gonna have to try to plan something out, but we’re talking about how to do it. So we’ll see.”

David added: “Everyone wants to make a new album, of course. It’s not like we’re doing a greatest-hits show and get the cash. I’m enjoying this more than I did before. I’m having so much fun. As Fred said, now it’s on our terms. So it’s just a lot of positive energy.”