The Agony & Ecstasy of Watain

“I deal a lot with finality and finitude and mortality in my work as a musician and as a writer,” Watain ringleader Erik Danielsson tells Apple Music. “I think it’s invigorating to contemplate. I find that life gets a bit more vivid and intense when you are aware of the mortality of things.” You can feel that intensity on the Swedish black metal band’s seventh album, *The Agony & Ecstasy of Watain*, which explores death on a personal and global level, often through the invocation of female archetypes both real and imagined. “It’s a bit unusual to have an album title that refers to the band,” Danielsson acknowledges. “But I would love to hear an album called *The Agony & Ecstasy of Morbid Angel*, for example. And I wanted something with some friction in it. You get a little bit curious, I think.” Below, he discusses each song. **“Ecstasies in night infinite”** “The title is a paradox in that I see ecstasy in this context as a brief, singular spark in an eternal night. There\'s something with that idea that pertains to how I look upon our existence in general. What I’m talking about here is really some kind of blazing hellfire or ecstatic revelation, like a radiant force—so strong that it may leave stars and worlds ablaze. It might be the force that we are absorbed into when we die. I’m not sure. But the song is a reflection on the briefness of life.” **“The howling”** “I had quite a lot of material that I felt leaned towards traditional Swedish black metal from the ’90s—not really Dissection, but more like underground bands from that time. That was a really inspiring starting point for me because that’s the scene I grew up in. So, it was cool to combine that with this lyric I had, which is a meditation on liminal spaces, the in-between. Like rites of passage, the witching hour, the equinoxes, the twilight—these moments when light collides with darkness and the sacred collides with the profane.” **“Serimosa”** “It was cool to release this as a single because I had no idea how people would react. I knew people would like ‘The howling,’ if I can be so cocky. But I was not sure about ‘Serimosa.’ I think you can hear a lot of my admiration for goth music in the opening riff and the verse. The name ‘Serimosa’ doesn’t have any origin in history or anything. It’s a word that was communicated to me in a magical context. It was a vision of a female godform, or archetype, that held in her hands the gift of the final transformation. It’s a sort of doomsday song.” **“Black cunt”** “This is a love song to the archetypal witch mother, and the title refers to the gates of spiritual rebirth. Once again, I’m talking about a liminal point of ingress through which magic currents pass. But the title also obviously opens up a potentially interesting debate around the use of words. To me, both words are positive. They are powerful and strong, and combined, I think they paint a beautiful picture of a dark, diabolical wellspring. But from a more conservative or normative viewpoint, they may be viewed as negative, degrading, or problematic.” **“Leper’s grace”** “That’s the last song we finished for the album. A lot of it was written in the studio. I had this lyric that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to use or not, and those lyrics are always the ones that I’m very happy that I did use in the end. It’s a bit of a continuation of the ‘Black Cunt’ concept—it deals with my experience of doing what we do in a world that is, at some level, the enemy. It’s a very anti-authoritarian song about my views on conformity and submission and a lot of the things that I really resent in the human race.” **“Not sun nor man nor god”** “The title of this instrumental is a Cormac McCarthy tribute. It’s borrowed straight from a very long sentence in the middle of a very long book. In the context of the album, this is the part of the journey when it’s time to sit down, take off your backpack, put your wandering stick aside, and think about where you have been. And maybe try to picture a bit where you’re going. It’s like the resting place for the pilgrim in the middle of his journey.” **“Before the cataclysm”** “This is the heart of the album, in a way. It’s a very big and grandiose song, and it’s about things that are always somehow present in my thoughts—like mortality and the hereafter, and the equal finitude of things both small and great. I have always loved songs like ‘Dark Are the Veils of Death’ by Candlemass and ‘Enter the Eternal Fire’ by Bathory. These songs are quite bluntly about approaching death but doing it beautifully, without fear or anxiety and a kind of anticipation of the great adventure that awaits us all when our time here has passed.” **“We remain”** “I began writing this in 2012, when we were on tour with The Devil’s Blood and In Solitude. We had one of the strongest triangular connections I’ve experienced between three separate entities. So, having Farida \[Lemouchi\] from The Devil’s Blood and Gottfrid \[Åhman\] from In Solitude on this song was kind of a tribute to that community and that time and the magical things that happened back then. Lyrically, it’s a kind of mythopoeia about the story of Watain and how it has been shaped throughout the years. It’s definitely the deepest and most profound song on the album.” **“Funeral winter”** “The material for this song is from the *Lawless* era. It was created very close to when we were going into the studio for that album, and we didn’t want to rush this. It didn’t really fit on *The Wild Hunt* and it didn’t really fit on *Trident Wolf Eclipse*, but now it was time to take it out again. Thematically, it’s a different approach to death than ‘Before the cataclysm.’ When we lose someone close to us, we must carry the weight of grief so that they, in turn, may fly light and free of their woes. Regardless of whether it’s true, I’ve always found comfort in this idea.” **“Septentrion”** “The title struck me when I saw it because it was during the real intense part of the writing process for this album. It contains both the word ‘septen,’ which is ‘seven’ in Latin, and also ‘trio,’ which is the triangle of Watain—the original triad of members. And ‘septentrion,’ it turns out, is an old word for the Northern regions of the world. It was used on ship logs but also in poetry. And the roots of it are even older, going back to the seven stars that constitute the Big Dipper, which is always visible. Lyrically, it’s me just trying to sum up everything that’s been on my mind for nearly 25 years of Watain. It’s about what has been, what is, and what is to come.”

Any kind of extreme music act that sticks around for several years faces the challenge of knowing how to proceed once it is three or four albums deep into its career. Pushing the intensity, whether it's speed or heaviness or whatever, will reach a ceiling at some point, but Scandinavian black metal...

Elliot Leaver reviews the new album from Swedish black metal titans Watain. Read the review of 'The Agony & Ecstasy Of Watain' here!

"There is little doubt that history will view this record as one of their greatest triumphs."

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Watain by WATAIN album review by Jahmeel Russell. The Swedish Metal band's LP, drops April 29, via Nuclear Blast