Meshuggah: "We've always been trying to groove"

With their ever-expanding legion of fans that reaches beyond the perceived limitations of heavy metal, Meshuggah are an unstoppable force at this point, or so you might think. “I’m snowed in!” starts guitarist Mårten Hagström when our call connects to Umeå in the remote northern reaches of Sweden. “I’m used to it, but the prospect of two hours of shovelling doesn’t exactly appeal.”

We’re interrupting a rare week of what the average man might consider domestic normality, but as a member of one of the hardest working bands in the business, Hagström’s shovel sits in the shed while he eagerly talks about the tech-metal giants' impending return this March with Koloss – a relatively concise and earthy sequel to level out 2008’s expansive and clinical ObZen.

“We haven’t really had much of a break at all,” he realises. “We finished off the mastering process for Koloss around Christmas, and then some of the guys went over to the States to have a listening party. We’ve been doing interviews, recording a video and right now we’re preparing to go to Australia. For us, this is normal stuff.”

Congratulations on the new album, it’s punchier than anything you’ve done in a long time; was ‘less is more’ the general idea?
“Normally we ask the question: with this thing we’ve been doing, this sound that we‘ve had up until now – how can we put it into a new light? Where can we go? We could pick up acoustic instruments but that wouldn’t really be honest. How can we keep the tone and the approach but present something that’s a little, y’know, out there on its own?”
“Once we’d written a couple of tracks we realised that something we’d been missing ourselves in Meshuggah records is what we really feel is important in every aspect of music – and that’s the groove. We’ve always been trying to groove, but the emphasis has been so that people can pick up on the technical parts of it. We really wanted to make sure that the arrangements and structures of the songs were, more so than ever before – groovier, slower and more sinister, but still with our touch to it. That, I think, made a more concise album.
“Secondly, and this is maybe of more importance to us, is that this is the most illusory album we’ve put out. With this album the intricacies of our music are a little more hidden – as you say, it tends to take a little while to grow on people – that’s messing with our heads just learning it. A total mindfuck; each song sounds slightly different every time, it’s quite reminiscent to Catch Thirtythree that way.”

Your last album, Obzen took the lengthiest period you’ve ever spent on any one album, and that certainly seemed to pay off. Was Koloss quicker?
“No, it took longer! [Laughs] We started writing it, I wrote a song and a half, plus a couple of riffs here and there; Fredrik [Thordendal, fellow axeman] had some ideas and Tomas [Haake, drummer] had some stuff going on that was early stages. Then we got an offer to go out on the road for a beautiful warm festival summer and we thought ‘Well, ObZen probably has some good touring time left on it, so we might as well halt the writing process and go on the road for a little bit more.’ I think that might have been a good thing; it made the album take longer but it gave us some perspective on what we’d already started and where to take it from there. We did the writing and recording process a bit differently this time. With ObZen, we’d write and arrange everything and know that this is the album, these are the songs, and they’re pretty much 100% ready for recording. On this album we recorded a couple of tracks and still had 50% of the album left to write. That also gave us more perspective and meant that more of us were involved in everything – this was more of a collaborative process than we’re used to. From where we’re sitting right now, that helped this album a lot.”

From where you're sitting, how does Koloss stylistically differ from Obzen?
“ObZen was us using our new sound to return to our roots – finding the metal and the thrash era and bringing it into what we’ve become today. This album is more organic – it’s a groovier album focused on the subtleties of the band, but still quirky enough to be a Meshuggah album [laughs].”

Have any personal highlights emerged from the tracklist?
“We were talking about this in rehearsal last week when we were trying to put together a live set for this UK tour, since that’s the first time we’ll be playing anything from Koloss. The thing that struck us was there’s no song that doesn’t really fit with the live set, which made us realise that this is probably, song for song, the strongest album we’ve put out.
"I really like the track we put out as a teaser on the internet, Break Those Bones Whose Sinews Gave It Motion, purely because it’s got all the makings of a Meshuggah song but a much more concise and groovy aspect of it. It’s almost a fuck you to that whole ‘hot mustard in your ass, playing every note as fast as you can’ type of approach [laughs]. We always like having a bit of that. But probably the most intense song on the album is The Demon’s Name Is Surveillance, which is Fredrik’s track all the way through and also one of my favourite songs. If I had to pick one I’d say Do Not Look Down, because it’s a fucked up, fun, eerie, retarded kind of song.”

Has it become difficult to follow up what you've done before without repeating yourself?
“Probably, but not because of any external expectations. It always feels weird to say we don’t care what people think [laughs], because we do. Obviously when you put out music you want your fans to like what you’re doing, otherwise we’d just keep it to ourselves. Probably the earliest we discussed this was on Chaosphere, back in ’98: we were like ‘How do we approach this?’ We were following up Destroy, Erase, Improve, which was the first album that anybody noticed of ours. We figured that the band we’re in sounds this way because we started out as stubborn Nordic motherfuckers – not caring about anything, just being in our bubble and blasting away at stuff that we feel is interesting right now, today. The only way through is to keep doing that. It doesn’t get any easier. The way we see it, there’s a lot of ground still to be covered, so it’s not for lack of inspiration.”

The majority of your lyrics are in English but I understand it’s not Jens [Kidman, vocalist]’s preferred tongue. Who handles the words?
“Tomas writes about 80% of the lyrics and I write the rest. Tomas and I have been writing with the intent of coming up with cool lyrics since we were kids. Jens and Fredrik started out with the approach of ‘we want to write cool music but fuck the lyrics’. They just wanted something to put on there. Jens and Fredrik don’t read books, for instance, whereas Tomas and I devour them.”

What are these particular songs about?
“We never really want to tell people what our songs are about – make up your own mind! [laughs]. There is a very loose theme in that on some level every one of them deal with dogma and conviction – the way you lose the greyscale in your mind  to decide that ‘this is right, this is wrong, and that’s the end of the story.’ In a sense that becomes a tool of power and corrupts your mind in many ways – these songs are about the dangers of that, basically.”

You and Tomas grew up together, are you very much on the same page in the band as a consequence?
“We’ve known each other since we were six; we’re kinda like brothers that way. I guess that helps a lot. There are a lot of things that are just understood between us. Fredrik and Jens have known each other since they were 12. We’re often asked why we’ve kept the same line-up apart from the bass player for so long, I would say it comes down to the fact we’ve known each other since childhood.” 

A few of your albums – particularly Nothing and Catch Thirtythree – have been highliy divisive. Do you consider that a benefit?
”I do, what’s really nice to see is we always piss a lot of people off when we release an album, and at the same time we seem to attract a lot of people who are almost surprised that they’re into us. Every album seems to be a divider, when Break The Bones was released to the internet that’s exactly what happened – you had fans who said [does best Bill S. Preston, Esquire impression] ‘This is sub-standard Meshuggah, it’s slow and monotonous,’ then somebody else saying ‘This is the best work they’ve put out – it’s so organic and groovy.’ Koloss will cater to some but not all. We didn’t want to put out the obvious single, which would have been The Demon’s Name Is Surveillance – people would pick up on what’s attractive about that right away, a lot like Bleed from the last album, but that would have been repeating ourselves.”

What’s often compelling about Meshuggah as a listener is that you’ve managed to avoid a lot of the clichés that come with performing as a metal band. What’s the most rewarding thing about playing in Meshuggah?
“We get to do what we always wanted to – when Tomas and I started playing we were really influenced by bands like Rush. People would say [Bill's back] ‘You listen to bands like Metallica and Anthrax, that’s not so experimental.’ Well it was to us, at the time it was really something new, and that’s what triggered us into at least trying to think outside the box. Having the opportunity to still be doing that when you’re 40 – going out and doing that for a living without having to compromise. We’re on a label that says ‘Hey guys, deliver an album to us – we don’t care what you do because we don’t understand it anyway, but we think it’s really good.’ That’s exactly where you want to be.  What I’m most proud of and happy with is that we haven’t lost our integrity.”

It must be a genuine thrill to hear bands like Metallica and Tool referencing the good work you’ve done over the years, bringing you out on tour to new places, and – more so in Tool’s case – openly bringing a little bit of Meshuggah’s flair to their own music…
“You know, it’s always nice to get respect from peers – not that it should carry any more weight, but when it’s from people whose music you’ve listened to yourself, closing the circle like that is really, really cool.”