Enslain: "Finnish Redemption Tour 2016 with STEELWING and FREEDOMINATION"

With Reset, Reboot, Redeem
you’ve stepped off of your earlier
trajectory and dropped a bit of
that playfulness in exchange for a
darker, more serious and mature
direction. What led to this?
Riley: The thing is, we were always
a very ambitious band with dark
lyrics, but most people never saw
beyond the surface of what we did.
This also has a lot to do with the
way we were promoted, as “Iron
Maiden kids” for the continental
European power metal scene.
Speaking of the two songs you
mentioned earlier for example:
cheeseball “Breathless” is a song
about sexual violence and “Full
Speed Ahead!” is part of the Zone
of Alienation story line, describing
how the remnants of mankind are
escaping a nuked-out Earth after religious
wars. But we got compared to fucking
Steel Panther and became known for
3-word choruses you could drunkenly
mumble-shout. So we decided to make
the third album shamelessly pretentious
and much darker. My goal with the lyrics
was to rid the listener of any hope for the
future. This time we wanted to shove
that ambition in the face of the listener to
make sure everyone “got it.”
In those very early years, you had some
amazing opportunities to tour with bands
like Sabaton, Accept and Blind Guardian.
From what I understand, though, you may
have rushed into this without the proper
expectations. Care to tell us about what
went well and what went wrong? What
lessons have you learned from jumping
into the deep end?
Riley: The biggest problem was that a
lot of people saw us as kids who just
stumbled upon a record deal. We didn’t
get the chance to prove ourselves on
the small club stages before hitting the
arenas, which is a problem of credibility in
this scene. We’ve rectified this and we’ve
proven that we can deliver energetic
shows and blow a lot of the competition
off the stage. And of course, we got the
deal in the first place because we were
good and we were doing the right thing
at the right time. No one’s giving you
breaks out of charity in the music biz.
On the upside, we did get to expose our
music to a lot of people all over Europe,
we won loads of new fans, and we have
good and bad memories for life. But it
was an expensive investment and we’re
still working our asses off to make even
the smallest profit from touring.
With that in mind, what are your hopes for Steelwing’s future,
and how do you intend to achieve them?
Riley: I’d say we have a very mature and sober look on things; we
know better than to expect to make a living doing this. What’s
important for me is to leave some kind of mark on the scene and
even if we don’t achieve any wider recognition, I just hope that
in 20 years some kid looking for forgotten gems is going to pick
up a Steelwing album, wave a clenched fist in the air and tell his
friends to check it out.
Why should someone like Steelwing? How do you feel you
differentiate from all the other bands out there that makes you
worth listening to?
Riley: That is a good question actually. Whenever I skim through
a rock or metal magazine I tend look at the stupid promo shoots
and think to myself “why the fuck are these guys doing this?”
and I guess that’s how others feel about us as well. With Reset,
Reboot, Redeem, I think we offer a very unique sound and genre
crossover. The earlier albums would be more difficult to justify in
this sense, but I think we’ve always set ourselves apart from a lot
of other bands in the scene with our deeper lyrical concepts and
quality songwriting.
I find your lyrics to be exemplary. “Sentinel Hill,” for example, has
such vivid and captivating imagery and colorful word choices, and
“Ozymandias” is written quite poignantly. Do you have any kind
of background as a writer or anything, or what are your major
sources of lyrical inspiration?
Riley: Well, thanks! I have no specific background in writing,
it has just always come easy for me. In my early teens I read
everything by 1920’s horror author H.P. Lovecraft, in English, and I
would always keep a dictionary by my side to look up all the cool,
archaic words he would use. So that’s definitely one of my early
inspirations. But mostly I think it comes from actually putting an
effort into the lyrics, not just farting out random words to give
the singer a vowel to hold with some vibrato – as so many other
bands unfortunately do. I like to think of the rhyme structure,
keeping the timing of the syllables right and writing lyrics that
sound good when sung, feel like poetry when read and that tell a
comprehensible story or portray a concept.
There’s a really cynical overtone to many of your lyrics – a deepseated
lack of faith in humanity and/or world politics. You seem
to have a bit of this cynicism in your nature, as well. Do you think
things are really that bad and that we’re all doomed, or does it
just amuse you to view things from this perspective? And how
much do you actually care about changing the world?
Riley: I actually have a lot of faith in the potential of mankind, it
just pisses me off to see us waste this potential through stupidity,