The previous album ‘Cosmic Terror’ came out in February 2020. What happened then? Could you play some gigs?
We started some shows on the seventh of February and the whole shit happened in the first or second week of March. We could play for one month. We had a small release tour. We could play six shows and five of them were sold out. For many people it was like the last concerts they attended before everything was shut down. It was amazing. The response was great, packed venues. If someone would have told me three years before, when nobody knew the band, there was nothing out there. We released out first album on our own and three years later we played headliner shows with 300 people, sold out shows. It was great that you get anything back for all the hard work you put in the band. So we were super excited to conquer the world, but unfortunately a couple of weeks later all hell broke loose in Europe and the rest of the world. Since then we are waiting to start again.

On the new album I think you free your progressive influences to the max, do you agree?
Yes, here and there we had something like that on ‘Cosmic Terror’ already, but actually when I started the song-writing for ‘Cosmic Terror’, the previous album, I wanted to go more in this direction, but I did not had the balls back then. I was not confident enough to do this and this time I said: ‘fuck it, I do what I want and let us do something new.’ Let me challenge myself and see if we can add this to our sound and it turned out – at least for us – very, very interesting. We had a lot of fun when I met Manuel (Steitz – drums) in the rehearsal room and we started working on the drums, adding special flavours really benefited our overall sound. It was quite challenging in the beginning, but you know that is always in life. You need to have some challenges to get out of your comfort zone.

I must say that these progressive tinges suit very well with the general atmosphere of The Spirit. I didn’t expect that…
It is always the same: when you add new elements, it can totally go wrong. There are tons of bands with a lucrative career, but when they made changes, it totally went backwards, you know and after that they changed again. But the challenge was to add these new elements, but still make good music. What I always want in our music, is that the songs flow. There always happens a lot in the songs, surely in the long songs, with a lot of riffs but not a single bad moment. The riffs are getting better and better. That is always the challenge.

In our former interview, you already said that you were often listening to progressive metal and progressive rock. So it is a logical development I think…
(surprised) I mentioned that back then in the interview? Yes, of course. I am not so much into progressive metal, rather into progressive rock from the seventies. The seventies are the golden age of prog music. All the good stuff: Rush, Yes, Camel, Pink Floyd,… all these great massive bands. And there is so much music that came out back then, I am still discovering many new bands every month. When I am listening to them, I ask myself: what the fuck was going on that I never heard of this band? How could I live 37 years on this planet without knowing this great band? It is still very exciting to find these diamonds of music, even when you think that you know already the most of them.

What were recent examples of bands you discovered?
(thinks) Probably the band I was listening to the most the last two weeks is a band called GTR. It is prog with a rock approach, but it is more like a super group, formed back in 1984 and they just released one album. It was Steve Howe, the guitarist of Yes and Asia and Steve Hackett, the former guitarist of Genesis. They released this one album and it totally blew my mind. I just found it by accident and it was on high rotation the last two weeks. I love it. There is one song, the best I have heard in years and it is called ‘Imagining’. It has everything I love. It is catchy, the vocals are super good… check it out maybe, if you have the time later. Another positive surprise is Saga, from Canada. I never checked them out deeply, but now I am on it right now. Awesome band. I want to discover new bands until the day I die. The seventies and eighties, I don’t want to be too nostalgic about it, but the level of musicianship they did back then was something completely different than nowadays. Even bands that never made it to a breakthrough, they had much more to offer than most bands nowadays. They say many negative things about the internet for the music business, but one of the positive things as a music lover and a music consumer, is that it is so easy to check out all these great bands from back in the days, which would otherwise probably be lost forever, but now with the internet it is so easy to discover these gems from back in the days.

I know you don’t like to talk about the lyrics, but there is one specific sentence I would like to have your thoughts about if possible. “The daily struggle should be seen in a larger context, the big picture often leads to clarity’ and so you came to the album title ‘Of Clarity And Galactic Structures’. Can you tell about that?
Yeah sure. I have no problems to talk about the lyrics, I just don’t like to explain the lyrics. These days it makes a big difference. These days, when I write lyrics, I always try to keep the lyrics open, so that everyone can access them. There are double meanings, metaphors and stuff and I don’t want to be strict when writing lyrics. So everyone can come up with his own conclusions, everyone can see it a bit different, I let it open to everyone. What you just mentioned is taken from the press sheet. Also this title has two different meanings to me. I like to keep it simple, it is just like overall, what we don’t do and what we should do more often, that we take a big step backwards and that we have a look on our life, on humanity, on several things, but from a different angle. We all live in our small bubbles and we lose the sight on what is going on beyond that. If you take a big step, it can cause a big change in perception. And then maybe take thousand steps and ten thousand steps back and take a look, then you will have another angle again and you will see things very differently.

That view also reminds me a bit of a sentence one can say to someone who is complaining about daily life: look at it from a different perspective: how bad are your troubles, seen from a cosmic kind of view? In the universal way?
Exactly! That is the thing! I don’t know, what are people complaining about? (thinks) I guess in the Netherlands it is the same as here, the prices for gasoline are exploding, they are super high. People complain about it, but what would you do with ten or twenty euros extra per month? It does not mean anything. Or when someone gets sick – it is always a terrible thing, it depends on what you have – but if you take ten million steps back and you see this small planet called earth where we are, we are a tiny dot. Take the last song on ‘Of Clarity And Galactic Structures’, called ‘Laniakea’ which is the super cluster where our galaxy, the Milky Way, is just a tiny dot, a tiny part of it. We are nothing! Our daily struggles are nothing compared to what’s out there. Complete emptiness.

And the universe is still expanding as we speak…
It is getting bigger and we find out every day, every year we find out so much more and that is the very exciting thing about this topic at all. We actually don’t know much. I saw yesterday or two days ago that the James Webb telescope made the first rough pictures of the universe. When this telescope is sending pictures, I guess in the next couple of years we have to rewrite a lot of science books again, because it will change a lot about what we know of the universe. That is what I hope, I don’t know if it will happen. There is more in life than go to work and buy stuff and consume stuff.

For the first time you have used synthesizers and it is very obvious in the latest track. It reminded me of Tangerine Dream…
Yes, I am a big fan of Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream and artists like that. I had this picture in my head about the song and I tried to turn it into music and into sounds. I thought it could work if we had a synthesizer on this track, but the challenge is… we did not know who would use the synthesizer in the studio, because our rule number one is everything we do in the studio, we will do it live as well. So it made no sense to use a synthesizer in the studio and then live nobody can play it. We don’t use backing tracks or whatever, that is an absolute no go, we will never do that. Everything we do on stage, we do it live, because it is quite normal nowadays unfortunately, that a lot of metal bands are using backing tracks, you know, with instruments, synthesizer, even vocals. I remember back in the days it was like a death sentence for bands when they used playback and nowadays it is just ‘normal’, unfortunately. For us it is important for everything we do, we do it live. When I had the idea to use a synthesizer for this track, I had to deal with it in that way that we can do it on stage as well. So I came out on a sequencer, Tangerine Dream is using it a lot. I can work on this one and combine it with guitar. I can move away from the synthesizer and play the guitar parts and the sequencer just gets into this repetitive mode in the background.