The previous time we talked was for ‘At Night We Prey’. Time flies, it is already four years ago…
Indeed, time flies. It feels like it was yesterday, although it came out in the middle of the pandemic.

Did you manage to tour in the end, when the metal jungle opened up again?
There was a tour planned, but it was postponed two times and finally cancelled. We are now looking forward to play live a lot and tour for the new album and of course, also a bit for the previous album. In the passed years Nightfall did mostly studio recordings. Now we are full on for live shows.

And then there was ‘Children Of Eve’, the new album…
Yes, this album has been made with the purpose for the band to play live, extensively live, as many gigs as possible. We built this album upon the basis of having epic choruses and a live atmosphere that we are going to deliver for shows. This time we will do our best to travel everywhere and play in any good venue in Europe, because we haven’t done that for so long. So we have to catch up. We only had the opportunity to play some really good festivals like HellFest and Karmageddon in Norway and Eindhoven Metal Meeting and it was a check, a test for us to see how good we are in this new line-up with the four of us. It proved that we are really ready to hit the road and play on every stage available. That is very important, because I have seen the good bands around when they sound good on their albums, but for some reason they cannot deliver 100% on stage. This happens with some bands sometimes. We are humans, we are not robots. So you have the good times and the bad times and I think that right now Nightfall is in the good season, let us say. We are under a good moon.

It has been a long road for Nightfall. I guess you must have seen good times and bad times…
If you take out the first season of the band at the nineties, where the band was happy and we were doing gigs and tours and everything, then for almost two decades the band was silent and mostly in the studio. So that was a long and difficult period. It was a long winter and I am very happy that I might to get out of it with more energy and power and ready to hit the road. It is very important and also another thing is, being away from the stages for so long, right now we are young again. I mean, we are fresh. We want to hit the road and do the things we did in all those previous years. The spectator can see that when watching Nightfall on stage. We have some sort of fresh air, which is very good.

Is it a concept album, because it starts with the woman who says all the titles in a row in the first song ‘I Hate’. It is something you don’t expect, but it feels like the songs are connected somehow?
It is a concept album, as most of the Nightfall albums and this time we want to say to people: hey, we need to be united, we have to fight against greediness and intolerance, produced and reproduced by religious radicals everywhere. Few years ago we had – due to the problems in the Middle East – we had an inflow of Muslims in our region, but most of the people accepted them with open arms as people who are really supporting them. Among them were some radicals and they started causing some troubles and that was the best excuse for our local radicals here to prove to these guys that they can do the same thing, with intolerance and aggression. I find myself and other people civilized. We like science, we like art, we like civilization, we like equality, freedom. Being caught in the middle among two, let’s say, extreme positions, but they fight each other and they caused trouble to our every days lives. This is very bad, because we used to say that diehard believers of any religions are bad people. I don’t believe that. I have respect for what anyone believes, because you believe in something or you don’t believe in something, it is something personal and I do respect it. Our problem – and this is where the album is about – is when organized religions (the leaders of the religion) are taking advantage of good people and they step on their need to believe in something and they exploit them, making advantage of them in order to follow their agenda, mostly it has to do with power. So they are taking advantage of the deceivers of simple people. This is where Christians and God stand for, the deceiver, someone who is a bit blind and tries to convince you in order to be accepted by their leaders you have to do this nasty thing or the other nasty thing. That applies to everybody. It applies to Muslims, to Christians, to Jews. It applies to these three Abrahamic religions, but nowadays they cause more havoc than relief. They are talking about love and acceptance, but they practice hate and intolerance. They try in many ways to affect our every day life. Take for example the issue about women’s rights in abortion. All rational beings on this earth agree that women have to decide what to do with your body and then you have some radical religions saying no you cannot perform this or that and you have to have the baby and I am going to tell you what to do with your body, otherwise God is not going to accept you and it is going to leave you in devastation. It is crazy. I cannot stand that.

They create fear to have the power…
Exactly. We tend to say we are brothers and sisters, we come from the same womb, where our mother is Eve and we have to embrace her, not turning against each other because of some extra radical people who try to take advantage of religious beliefs among people. The poor are suffering and they just want to believe in something, so we are pointing at the higher hierarchies of the religious institutes and politicians and not the simple people suffer. Everybody suffers these days everywhere.

You can interpret the title in two ways. Eve as biblical mother or things like ‘eve of destruction’, the moment before…
It is high time to try to embrace the female nature of this world, because we believe that it is not as high as it should be. If you see how the female world has been treated by religious doctrines, it is like second class citizens, it is like second class human beings. That really annoys us as well. We try to make people who are going to listen to the album and read the lyrics to think twice about the wrongdoings in our society, because there may be wrongdoings and maybe they will think it is happening because it is the way it is. I am not against religions, I am not against structures. I am not calling people to go out and burn cemetery churches or fight with each other. I am just going for unity, but in order for religions to be good. We have to reconsider some things instead of taking it as granted. It is weird, because if you go through the bible and read about the reaction of the so-called merciful and peaceful god. Eve, after she dropped the apple from the snake. She did it because she wanted to do that and consequently the entire female population was punished with nine months of pain whenever one becomes a mother. This is a real punishment, it is crazy how a religion of love supports such a sort of collective punishment. It is like they should punish the Germans now because two generations before, we had that Second World War. It is crazy! Rational people, like you, like me, like everybody around us, are thinking that things have to be taken into consideration about respecting other people to be able to live together and accept each other as we speak and not being one against the other. So we are getting confused, because you are hearing things that are not rational. The whole thing is becoming really annoying and I see that in Europe and in the US. Christian radicals are gaining momentum. That will have an immediate effect on things that we are taking for granted right now, like playing the music, like having a sort of concept in our albums, like art, like freedom, like science. These people would like very much to drive us back to medieval times. So we need to resist somehow and we need to stay together. No matter our colour, no matter where we are coming from, we have to stay united against this force. It is not a good thing, but it is happening.