How are you doing Christofer? How do you look back at the creation of Therion’s 17^th album ‘Leviathan’?
I am doing fine, thanks. After ‘Beloved Antichrist’ I felt completely empty and I really did not know what to do next. We thought anything we haven’t done is trying to make a record without surprises. We have made fifteen albums and we always did what we want. Sometimes the sales go down and then we make another record and the sales are going up again. We always tried different things. We have always been explorers, but I have done everything I wanted, you know. So the only challenge left was to try to make an album, a so-called ‘classic’ Therion album. The thing was: before ‘Beloved Antichrist’ I could never control my song-writing. I would write whatever I would write, but for ‘Beloved Antichrist’ I had to teach myself how to write in a certain style, because when you write themes for a rock musical, if something happens in a scene, you have to write the music for that scene. You have to write music for a love thing, for a divorce or music that feels like a monologue… very different stuff. So I taught myself how to write in certain directions. What we did now, we tried to catch the essence of the most popular Therion songs. We did not want to copy specific songs or specific albums. We rather wanted to explore the quintessence, the soul of the songs that are most popular and find out why these songs are the most popular ones. Trying to carry on that soul into the new compositions. We found out that there are three different sorts of songs that people like. You have the very epic, bombastic songs, like ‘To Mega Therion’, you have the more pop-like songs like ‘Son Of The Staves Of Time’ and this album ‘Leviathan’ is in that direction. Very epic and grandiose yet catchy. We found another part which is more melancholic and dark. You find a lot of those songs on ‘Vovin’, our most popular album, like ‘Raven Of Dispersion’ and ‘Clavicula Nox’. Or the ‘Draconian’ trilogy: all very melancholic and dark. We wrote enough material for another moody dark album as well. And if you ask the diehard fans, the ones who buy everything as long as there is Therion on it, they often tend to prefer the more experimental, crazy side of Therion or adventurous songs, like ‘Land of Canaan’ or ‘Via Nocturna’, mostly very long tracks with thirty different riffs. When the song starts you have no idea how the song is going to end. Those are actually my favourite songs too. So we have also enough material to make a third album, which is more adventurous and experimental with some progressive stuff too. So we are making a trilogy of albums and ‘Leviathan’ is the first one. We already started to record the second and the third one, now that this one is ready and it seems like we are going to call them ‘Leviathan II’ and III. They kind of belong together. We kept it a secret. We wrote over forty songs. This whole corona thing is very bad, but we always try to take the best out of every situation. If we cannot tour, then let us write music and record.

Was it the original plan to write three albums or did that happen because you had so much time on your hands?
We just got the inspiration and one of the main reasons is that me and Thomas Vikström have really found each other as a song-writing duo. We are a great song-writing team. Sometimes, when I wrote a song in the past, I would never finish it. If I wasn’t happy with it, it wasn’t good enough and I dropped it and did not record it. Now, if I have something which is good, but I’ not sure, maybe Thomas can figure it out and find the last piece of the puzzle. The other way around as well, Thomas sends me anything he writes, even if he has doubts. Sometimes I find something which is great, ‘Great Marquis Of Hell’ is a good example of that. It was a song that would never fit Therion. Too commercial. But I liked the chorus. I wrote new riffs to it and changed some major chords to minor and all of a sudden it sounded great. Then I wrote an intro to it and now it sounds very Therion like, actually most Therion like which is ironic, considering the fact that its original song was too commercial. Another example is ‘Eye Of Algol’. I had the riff and a nice groove, but I thought my vocal melody was too weak. I did not have good ideas for a vocal melody. So I sent it to Thomas and said: here is a song, do whatever you want with it. He wrote exactly the vocal melodies that I was looking for, but I could not find them. I got some extra inspiration and fine-tuned the vocal melodies and finally we had a new song which is my favourite on the record actually. Normally it would remain in de hard driver as unfinished song. I have tons of such material. If I ever run out of inspiration, I still have hundreds of songs that I can send to Thomas, for my whole life. So we wrote a lot together, most of the record actually. I wrote three songs alone: ‘Tuonela’, ‘Azi Dahaka’ and ‘Leviathan’ and he wrote ‘Ten Courts Of Diyu’ and ‘Nocturnal Light’ alone and most of the material for the other records, me and Thomas wrote together.

Does it mean that he lives in Malta too or do you send files?
We send files. He lives in Spain. This album was recorded in Sweden, Israel, Malta, Argentina, USA, England, Germany, Spain and Finland. Nine countries. We had two drummers on the record. Snowy Shaw was recording first and he has crazy ideas. He is very original and really cool and he has a certain style, but he only fit for a few songs. We did not like it on the other songs, so we decided to rerecord it with Björn from Easy Action.  He has a completely different background. You know Easy Action, the glam band? They have Kee Marcelo from Europe in their ranks. They were never internationally famous, they were very famous in Sweden back then and then they broke up and Kee Marcelo joined Europe and they made a reunion ten years ago or something and Nalle (Phalsson – Vera), our bass player is playing with them in the reunion line-up. He said you should try Björn. I would never have thought about a glam drummer, but well, why not? He has a very different approach and just because he is playing in a glam band, that does not mean that’s the only thing he knows. He plays very groovy and this part was missing, Snowy was not steady enough, it was too stiff. So we tried with Björn and it really rocked, you know. He uses a lot of percussion, like shakers and even maracas in one song, he uses tambourine a lot. I remember we used tambourine one time, to get a bit of a groove, but Björn is using it in every song. We mixed it very low, so maybe you never think about it, and that’s the whole point: you should not think about it, it is just there to make a groove. It was really cool to get fresh views on how to put drums. Björn’s recording is the best drum sound we ever had. The only problem with everything recording on distance was, that normally you can communicate directly. If someone does a take I don’t like, I can ask to do it once again. Then they just do different, you don’t waste a lot of time. Now if we recorded everything on distance, I had to send them demo tapes with instructions and hope that they understand what I want. In most cases it worked, because everybody is professional, but in other cases I wasn’t happy and had to go back to the studio and rerecord, but that is of course very expensive. You waste a lot of time. So it was a very expensive way of working, but on the other hand also very effective, because once you have recorded drums, bass and rhythm guitars, you can start recording things at the same time. So I am just in the middle, collecting all the files, doing the editing, putting things together… quite stressful with all the time zones on top of that. If they want to know something, you need to be available all the time.

Was it during the corona crisis?
Yes, we started recording in February. The reason why we had to use Vienna Symphonic Instruments library, because it is the best sample library on the planet and even film music is recorded that way these days. It is so good that you don’t hear the difference with an orchestra these days, except for solo instruments. We recorded real violin, but the main reason to use that was not budgetary, it was because of the restrictions we were not allowed to gather an orchestra. The choir was done is Israel, because they did not have restrictions at that time. I was going to record a choir in Malta first, but we only were permitted to gather three people, it would have been a very small choir. But in Israel they did a great job, so we are going to continue working with them. I knew Hellscore and I knew Noa Gruman from the band Scardust, a very good band, progressive. They were our support act in Israel and I was going to ask her anyway for a solo guest appearance, in ‘The Courts Of Diyu’ she does the verses and so we got in contact with the choir.