The new album ‘I, The Mask’ comes pretty fast after the previous one, but how do you look back personally at those last two and half years since ‘Battles’ came out?
Well, we haven’t been – so to speak – outside the bubble to be honest. I mean, we did the record and pretty soon after we went on tour. We had a very eventful touring cycle. We did a lot of festivals, we did a lot of touring in the US, we have been very busy. We just had such a wonderful experience when we did ‘Battles’, that we were inspired and felt creative enough to make another record fairly soon. But we see touring and recording – or writing – as two very different things. We do either touring or writing. Well, at some point we stopped touring and decided: ‘Let’s do it again.’ The energy was there, so we wanted to save that momentum to be creative. I am happy and I am super excited about the record. We had it for a long time, without showing it. It was recorded and the first mix was in June last year. We recorded from the end of February 2018, all the way through May basically. So we had it for a long time and now we are very excited that it will finally be released.

It is a stunner. Spontaneously I have written down: ‘so much beauty and rage on a record of darkness and hope’…
I like the way you said that, because it is exactly what it is. It should be a little bit of a rollercoaster. I mean, musically as well as thematically and emotionally. So… yes, that’s a very good description.

For the writing process you went to the US for the second time, working with producer Howard Benson. Without the other guys, isn’t it?
It was me and Anders in the house. Writing, making demos. Then bouncing the ideas with Howard, having him filtering it, having his expertise and experience go through it. We knew what to expect, because we did it once before for ‘Battles’. I think the ‘Battles’ recording was more nervous for us, because we never really opened up. We never really let anybody from the outside mess around with our music and lyrics. It took us a very long time to appreciate and understand the experience of this guy. We had producers in the past, but we never really listened to them. It is a shame now in hindsight, because these guys are very good in what they do. But now it is okay. We’ve gone all the way over there and we have this awesome producer that we really, really like. So we said: maybe we should listen to him.

Is he such a dominant person?
He can be very direct and he is there for a reason of course. It took us a while to realize: okay, we have this guy now, maybe we should listen to him. He had so much good input on what we were doing. He did not want to change anything, he just wanted to make sure that we don’t mess around. We played at the top of our abilities, so that we really think true and get to the core message of In Flames. Having done that the first time, it was easy for us to just go there and be ourselves. The setting is fantastic, the equipment as well and he is a genius. He has done Aerosmith, Van Halen, death metal records, a Kiss record, he is working with Bryan Adams… He has done all those huge acts, so of course he knows his stuff and the process is super fast and easy. Very efficient. I did not need to spend 12 to 14 hours in the studio, but six hours in the studio and then we had energy left when we got back to the house and continue writing. So the three months we spent there in LA, we kept on writing, all the way until the last week. It says a lot about how inspiring it was, and how creative and efficient.

And it seems that the sequence of the songs on the record is the one from creating them, isn’t it?
Indeed, ‘Voices’ was the first song we wrote. It instantly felt like an opener. Although we did not know what we had yet, but that was interesting and ‘Stay With Me’ was actually the last song that we did.

Sometimes you hear that bands really struggle with the order of songs, trying to find a natural flow for the album…
Anders does that really early and it helps in the song writing process too, because as soon as you have a bunch of demos, you kind of lay them out like this. He thinks a lot about the flow he wants and also about the story that’s been told. If you have that, it is easy to see what you are missing. A kind of blueprint, black map. Then you can just fill in the voids and focus. It is a good thing. At least for us.

Let’s select some topics on the record. ‘(This Is Our) House’ deals with your concerns for our planet. You regularly give money on charity for that, so I think you are really concerned about it…
I think most people are. We do some things in order to help. We have a good platform perhaps, to make people – at least – aware, but we are not a political or a religious or even an emblematic band, so that is not the point. We are not here trying to be saviours, that’s not the case. But we have a platform and we try to use it to do something that could be good for all of us. At least to an extent, we don’t want to preach. That is not our kind of thing. We don’t want to be drown in negative spirals either. If you look at statistics, true statistics, a lot of things are way better than you think. Because you only hear the bad things. Why would the news report: ‘today twenty thousand planes landed without an incident.’ They will only report it when a plane crashes. The news makes it easy to think that the world is a really shitty place, but not necessary. Obviously we have a lot of problems in the world and we do not want to neglect any of those at all, but – when speaking of the title track – we all wear masks sometimes. To an extent, it depends on who you are talking to and the situation.

I think it is even taught in our education…
It is and it is a way of behaviour to function in this society. I mean, if we should be totally open to everything it would be too much to handle, because we are not used to that. I would be super stressed if somebody comes in and just goes all the way. We all have our filters and our masks and we decide what we show to other people in a given situation. So I am obviously wearing a mask now, because I am in interview mode. And that’s not because I am in a band, it is a part of what I have to do. And I find it interesting that people are interested in what I do. It is a good thing in the end. But I think we all do, in every aspect, and sometimes it is hard to connect with people or situations. To the essence of somebody, having that connection, because it is easier to remain shallow. I think on social media you can see it directly. People only show the best, you don’t see the shitty days. Then one might believe that life is supposed to be that way and then your whole life turns to shit, because you are not on the beach every day, you are not in a fancy house or having the perfect make up… So life is really not that simple.