The Haunted Enjoy Themselves, Get Back On Track

It took a few years, but metal giants The Haunted are finally getting their act together. Releasing their fourth album "rEVOLVEr" this month, the raucous quintet (singer Peter Dolving, guitarists Anders Bjorler and Jensen, bassist Jonas Bjorler and drummer Per Moller Jensen) feel good about their music for a change. Working through a mountain of problems that would have killed lesser bands, these randy Swedes have turned the negative into a positive.

"We’re enjoying ourselves a lot more now than ever before," says Dolving. "The overall feeling in the band is more positive. We have a new label, we have a new singer — me — who isn’t completely fuckin’ suicidal and on drugs, we have a new album and we have fun when we play. Very few people have all of that, so in our eyes things are finally great. And that means we’ve actually made an album that we can be proud of."

Managing to strike that ever-elusive balance between enjoying your craft and actually building something meaningful, The Haunted couldn’t be prouder of "rEVOLVEr." Sonically closer to the band’s earlier output than their more recent swing to metalcore, Dolving says that "rEVOLVEr" might be a bit of a misnomer. They’re almost regressing musically. But in this case, the slip is "back on track."

"There were a few years where The Haunted fell off the rails in some ways," he says. "We weren’t putting out bad music, but sometimes it was too influenced by external sources. With 'rEVOLVEr,' we’re stepping back more towards the first album. That has to do with being purists. I don’t know what the fuck that means, but it’s what we are. We’ve stripped it clean with this album: a basic five-piece band just playing. That’s closer to what we achieve live. I think 'rEVOLVEr' is real Haunted."

And what, pray tell, is "real Haunted?" Dolving thinks that it’s a conscious shift away from throwing tracks together and worrying about how they sound on the record and focusing on actually writing them in the first place, a problem that has plagued them for years now.

"Somehow the sound became more important than the actual songs. This time, we started focusing on the songwriting more now than ever and that showed us the biggest problem we were having: the energy was lacking. With some of us not living in the same city, it took a toll on what we were trying to do. There was a lot of jamming without a singer and sent tapes back and forth. That has an impact on the finished product because you don’t have the interaction you need between members. Now that we’re all in the same physical space and headspace, we can make sure that every element stands up for itself. At the end of the day, we’re still pretty basic metal."

Source: Chart Attack