In 2018 you released the previous album ‘The Persistence’, but that is already six years ago. So, what happened after that release?
We had a couple of extensive tours for ‘The Persistence’ in Europe. One with Pain Of Salvation, it lasted a month. Then we did another headline tour right before the lockdown basically. We came home and the day after, we went under lockdown. So then there was covid-19 and we basically could not play the whole period of covid-19, because our studio is located in another region of the country. We could not go there and all our instruments were in the studio, because we went under lockdown the day after we had loaded all the stuff in the studio. So I did not had any instrument at all.

What a frustration!
Yeah. So we started working on the new record right after the pandemic and I have to say that we worked pretty fast. We finished the record – all the recordings, the mixing and the mastering – in 2022. The record was ready. So it was four years with covid-19, which was not such a long time if you think about it, but at the same time, with ‘The Persistence’, our contract with Sensory Records – our last label – expired and we wanted to look for another label, just to try something different. If there was any other label interested in the band… it was… several. We received several offers and we took a few months to collect offers and decide which one of them we were going to work with. Then we signed to Season of Mist, a very big label and the thing is that they have long time schedules, because they have a lot of releases. So it took one year basically and so we will release the album six years after ‘The Persistence’, but the album is – for us – already two years old.

Sometimes you create concept albums and lyrics are very important for the band. I think vocalist Diego Marchesi is writing the lyrics?
Yes, he wrote the lion’s share of the lyrics. I wrote the lyrics for just one song on this record.

Nevertheless can you tell something about the story and what inspired you in general?
I think we always try to speak about things that matter to us. I know Diego is a kind of very emotional guy, so he is always talking about the world around him, things that affect him directly. So it is about friends and life in general. With this record I think he really wrote some deep lyrics, especially the ones about how to deal with trauma and recover from it and enrich yourself with all the experiences you go through. It is a very emotional record for him and for us.

You hear that in the music as well, since you have evolved since the beginning, but I still recognize the Kingcrow I got to know with ‘Insider’…
That is a long time ago (chuckles). Yeah we always try to make the atmosphere in the music matching with the lyrics. Diego writes the lyrics and I spice the atmosphere of the song with it. So we always try to have this good combination of the atmosphere of the song and the lyrics. It is very important for us.

Which one is your lyric?
‘’New Moon Harvest’. Many people think it is a song about relations, but it is actually more about my relationship with music.

What does the track ‘Kintsugi’ mean?
Kintsugi is a Japanese art with a certain philosophy. You learn about the rich history and philosophy and then break and repair a ceramic bowl by using gold, so that it even looks better than before it was broken. It is very beautiful and it is a great metaphor for traumas and how you recover from it. It can enrich you because it represents what you are going through in your life. It makes you what you are now.

Is there a special reason for choosing the album title ‘Hopium’? Does it have any affinity with opium?
In the beginning, during the preproduction, there was an intro to the record which was called ‘Hope’. The last track was ‘Opium’. So I titled the entire album ‘Hopium’, choosing those two words. I thought about using such a word and then I talked with Diego, the singer, about it and we thought it was a cool title. It was a working title in the beginning, but it stayed during the whole process and then the lyrics were a concept and that’s how it ended up as title of the record. So it is a kind of good accident.

There is a piano solo in that lengthy song ‘Hopium’ from Vikram Shankar. How did you meet him?
I knew he was a fan of the band. I had the idea of putting a crazy piano solo on the last section of the song and I contacted him and I told him… I don’t remember clearly, but I gave him some references and I told him: ‘just go crazy’ and just a day later, he sent me the solo. It was perfect, splendid at first strike. It is the big epic on the record.

Let us go back in time now, because not everybody will know the band. You and your brother founded the band in 1996…
We started playing together, it was not really a band, but we play together since 1996.

What were the intentions at that time? Did you have heroes who influenced your musical direction?
I think we started playing covers at that time. I remember playing every sort of music, from The Beach Boys to Slayer, Iron Maiden,… very different styles and then it was a common friend of us that started playing the bass. That’s how the band started basically, but the beginning was just for fun, playing covers and everything. It was like a teenager kind of band. The first album only came in 2001.