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It took some time for Dries to answer the questions, but after all it was worth the wait. With a excellent album out, we asked Dries about a few things we wanted to know about the album and the band. Hope you enjoy it. The band started back in 1987 (as Crap Society) and changed the name in Dries Van Damme (lead guitar): Haha, of course not. In 1987 I was only 14 years old when we first started out. We didn’t have a clue. Things didn’t started to get serious until 1992-1993, when we started working towards our first album, which eventually got released in 1995. From then on, it was always our goal to build a catalogue, to establish the band on the long term. With 7 albums below our belt, a couple of EP’s and having played shows all over After the album “This Violent Decline” you have been touring a lot, how was it and what is the weirdest story you can tell about that tour. One of the coolest things we did for “This Violent Decline” was going on tour with King Diamond. I have been a fan ever since I started listening to metal 25 years ago. It was so cool to meet King and spend time on the road together. As for weird stories: there are so many. When we were touring with Agent Steel we had to leave our light guy at the border of When did the band start writing songs for the album and who is responsible for the biggest part? I wrote 95% of the album, as usual. “Cult Of Sin” was written over quite a long period, somewhere between the summer of 2007 and the summer of 2008. We also recorded in two sessions, one in the spring of 2008 and one in the fall of 2008. We really took our time to make it the best possible record. “This Violent Decline” had been doing really well, so we wanted to make sure the new album would be better than “Decline”, haha. The album has a great sound, how was it working with Dan Swanö and whose idea was it, the bands or the label? It was our idea to get Dan involved. We have had the privilege to work with great producers over the years. At the basis, we always work with Dee J., who has been our live sound guy since 1995. He knows the band inside out. We also worked with Harris Johns, which was really cool, as he produced some of my favourite records, such as Voivod’s “Dimension Hatross”. For “Decline” we worked with Fredrik Nordström (Opeth, In Flames, Dimmu Borgir, etc). We were very happy with the result. But we really wanted to try something else with the new record. I had been talking to Dan Swanö a couple of times over the years, and now we finally got to work together. I must say that Dan’s work is even better than what we had expected. And we really had big expectations to say the least! Dan’s production work is ultra heavy, but also very open en very detailed – just like we wanted it to be. I wrote in my review that you play Belgian Bay Area Thrash; can you live with that determination? Yeah sure. We live at the Belgian coast, at the I still can hear that After All makes progress in song writing. Is that because you play live with a lot of bands that you must be fan of too? I mean Agent Steel, King Diamond, Vicious Rumors, Exodus, Testament, etc etc. not the worst to join the stage with... Well, we have learned a lot from touring: mainly about the logistics of a band on tour, or how you build your live set and make it a real metal show, or about guitars and amplifiers, that sort of thing. I agree that we still make progress writing songs, but that’s mainly because we gain experience as song writers I think. With every song we write, we understand better what works best for this band. What is your favourite song on the album and why? Probably ‘Betrayed by the gods’, because some of my heroes are playing guest solos on that song: Juan Garcia and Bernie What is the biggest difference with “The Vermin Decline” in your point of view? The production is more open, it is more detailed. As far as the song writing is concerned, we took more time to work on the arrangements and the little details. The singing of Piet Focroul sometimes sounds a little similar to J.D. Kimball (Omen) in my opinion. What do you think of that? I like Omen quite a lot. So that’s cool. They played here in There are quite some guest musicians playing along, did they really come to the studio or was it all contributed in the modern way (internet). The guest solos and guest vocals where recorded in studios spread over the world. We worked in What on earth does the band pay every time for participating in a tour with such well known bands, for 2009 you start playing with Forbidden, Abattoir and Testament! Is the label doing such good work? You got the wrong idea. As a matter of fact, we actually got paid for the shows you mentioned. Not that much, but still enough for us to enable us to do these kind of shows. Over the years, After All has become a small business in itself, so we finally started to make some money from shows, cd’s, merchandise, etc. We invest the money back into the band. That gives us the freedom to play the bigger tours, even if we don’t get paid all that much on those tours. The 7 albums I can’t live without are: (no not your own! He he!) Mercyful Fate – Don’t break the Oath And there’s lots more of course… This has not been asked in the interview, but I definitely want to tell you that... We’d really love to play in Interviewed by Reinier de Vries
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