In a recent interview with Finland’s Chaoszine, SAMAEL frontman Michel “Vorph” Locher spoke about the progress of the recording sessions for the band’s long-awaited follow-up to 2017’s “Hegemony” album. He said: “The album is pretty much recorded. It’s done, but Xy‘s (SAMAEL drummer Alexandre ‘Xytras’ Locher) still doing some adjustment with editing. We are looking for the mix. I mean, we were supposed to start mixing in January, but it didn’t happen. So, it’s gonna be before the summer, I will imagine, then mastering. So our plan is to release one song this year at least, and most probably the album next year then. It’s not in the stone, but, yeah, that’s the plan so far.”

Regarding the musical direction of the new SAMAEL material, Vorph said: “Well, it will have a strong bond to ‘Hegemony’, but it’s not the same. I mean, we kind of try to take advantage of the fact that we’ve done different things throughout the years. So we got some space that people will accept that this is SAMAEL. So we kind of try to enjoy that space. Some of the crowd, they enjoy when a band sticks to a formula — you know what you’re gonna get. With us, it’s a bit different, but it won’t be a total surprise. There is no experimentation of things that we’ve never, ever done before, but the mix is different and there is a lot more guitar. It’s a lot more guitar-oriented. So, yeah, that’s one of the differences, I would say.”

On the topic of SAMAEL‘s plans for the coming months, Vorph said: “We haven’t planned any tour on this year. It’s just gonna be standalone shows. We do this festival in Texas in March, and we go to Brazil. We’ve got three shows in Brazil, we’ve got two shows in Greece, some little festivals. But, basically, what we wanna do this year is finish the album. That’s very much the priority. Let’s hope it will happen. But I’m very confident about the material we got. It took us forever, but it happened during COVID, so we had a lot of time. We were listening the stuff together. So it was like a — I will not say a group material, because Xy‘s still doing all the music, but we were discussing it together, so I think it had the time to mature and to reach point where it should be.”

When the interviewer noted that it is also “sometimes a little bit dangerous” when musicians spend too much time tinkering with recordings, Vorph concurred. “It is. It definitely is,” he said. “I mean, all the work that Xy‘s doing now, for me it is not that important. Because he will play me the song and I’ll say, well, ‘Oh, the break there with the drums, that was not there before, ah, it’s cool, but does it make the song really better?’ Ah, maybe very little, but for him it’s very important, especially because it took him so long, so he don’t wanna miss one little thing… I’m a bit more, ‘Let’s do it.’ He’s really picky about everything.”