Anticult Interview: Wacław “Vogg” Kiełtyka of Decapitated

Decapitated are gearing up to release their seventh album Anticult which is due to drop on the 7th July via Nuclear Blast Records. A couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to have chat with founding member and guitarist Vogg about the new album and a few other topics. Read on for the full transcription…

You’re currently gearing up to release the new album Anticult. How do you feel the response has been to the singles that have been released so far?

We released the second single about 3 days ago and I think the reaction so far has been really good! I’ve seen a lot of good reviews and opinions on the two songs we have released so far. I think we chose good songs for the singles as, I’m not sure if you’ve heard the album already…

I have yes.

Right, so you know how varied this album is. It was very hard to choose the songs but I think we made the right choice. You know, people talk and things but I’m really happy with how the promotion and the reaction has been so far. I’m also really happy that we chose to do two music videos for them instead of doing the lyric or 360 videos. I’m not a fan of doing that kind of promotion and to me it’s always better to have official videos. I really like the video for “Earth Scar” as that was a lot of fun to shoot.

Touching on “Earth Scar”, you worked with Grupa 13 again for this video. What was it like to work with them again?

It was great! There were a few things we changed during the editing and we were kind of on a deadline with it from the label. I talked with the director from Grupa 13 and said to him “Dude, there’s no need to be stressed. Take your time with it and I’ll work it out.” So we were a little later with the video but the end result is much better and I really like it. All the guys there are super professional and they really did a great job with the video.

Compared to Blood Mantra, how different would you say the new album is?

Well, the album kind of follows on from the previous album in some ways but there’s obviously some differences. The first thing that’s different is the sound of the album as we changed the people we worked with and the studio we used to get a bit more of a raw sound. In my opinion, I’d say this album is more of our ‘own’ album. With Blood Mantra, we were kinda influenced by Meshuggah and bands like that quite a bit. I feel with this album, we’ve kind of found our identity and there’s a lot more groove in this album.

The songs are also a little bit shorter than on Blood Mantra which in my opinion is good. It means that you don’t have to wait too long for things to happen and the action is much faster than on the previous album. In some ways, I feel as though we took the experience we gained from Blood Mantra and tried to up the ante with it and make a better album. It was kind of challenging, but I really feel as though we’ve taken a step forward with this album.

In just under two months, you’re coming back to the UK to play Bloodstock festival. Are you looking forward to that?

Oh yes. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s one of my favourite festivals to play in Europe and it’s got such a special atmosphere about it. I can’t wait to play it!

Taking a slight tangent now, you also play guitar in Lux Occulta…

Yes, that’s right. Erm, I can’t translate the name from Polish into English as it’s quite complicated. I’ve done the three previous albums with them and at the moment it’s on hiatus actually. It’s like a sleeping volcano almost. I’m not actually the composer in this band, there’s another guy and vocalist who writes most of the music and I kinda fill in my parts. I’ve got some ideas for some new music for it but we’ll see what happens with that. There was a lot of good music that we did and the shows were really well attended as well.

Coming back to the album, last time we spoke, you mentioned that you write the music and Rasta writes the lyrics. Was this the same for this album?

Almost. For this album, I worked with our drummer Michał Łysejko who helped me a lot with the arrangement. I came up with all the ideas for the music and Michał came up with the drum parts for the album. So in a way he was the ‘co-producer’ for the album. Our new bassist didn’t bring any ideas per se, but he had some really good ideas for the arrangement of the bass lines and they ended up sounding really good. If he’s in the band longer then it’d be cool to work with him for the next album to write some of the music. We’ll see what happens though.

And finally, describe the band in 3 words.

Ah, this is a really hard question….

Erm….

Polish Extreme Metal.

New album Anticult is out on July 7th

Decapitated: official | facebook | twitter | youtube | google+ | myspace

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments