Not A Minute To Spare

"It's impossible for me to step away from the music… But that's fine. I guess it's the only thing I love to do except getting drunk and screwing. But you can't really pay your bills with those.”

Peter Tägtgren is one busy dude. As he tells it, between his work in Swedish death metal juggernaut Hypocrisy, the industrial metal outfit Pain and what he does as the owner/operator of famed The Abyss studios, he rarely ever gets a chance to step away from metal, except for when he, ­ahem, takes the odd night off. Case in point, when we talk he's actually sitting in his recording studio, taking a moment's break from recording the next Hypocrisy album. The frontman sounds pretty pumped about the work too.

“Right now we're in the studio and when we finish the interview we're going to hit the record button and then we'll have the drums tracked for the album. There's a lot of classic Hypocrisy elements in there, I've gone back to the self-titled album and have drawn inspiration from some of that stuff. I mean overall, you're definitely going to have the fast songs, the slow songs and the mid-tempo songs, I think we have ten or eleven songs and there might only be nine on the record. So if we take away two of the slow songs it's going to be a fast album, if we take away two of the fast songs it's going to be a slow album so I can't comment on the album's direction, but it's definitely going to have that Hypocrisy sound in there.”

A new album isn't the only thing keeping Tägtgren and his cohort busy. When we talk they're also in the thick of rehearsals for an Australian tour, their first ever since forming in 1990. Understandably, the vocalist/guitarist is stoked about getting the chance to tour down here. He says he's not even worried about the shock of coming from a Swedish winter into Australia's summer heat.

“You can do Europe and America until you bleed, but it's really fun to go places that you haven't been before. We've been playing for twenty years and still haven't been able to make it over there until now. Because we'd never been there before it was one of our goals to get over there and to see the Australian fans and now that we're actually getting that chance we're all super-excited.”

All the preparations for this upcoming Australian run are another responsibility piled onto Tägtgren's already mammoth workload. And that seems fine by our man, but surely it still must be hard to balance that workload when he's making appearances on Exodus records and producing some of the recent works of bands like Overkill and Septicflesh.

“For me, it's simple because I can sing a couple of lines when a friend asks me to contribute to their album, that doesn't take too much time. So I just focus on Hypocrisy and Pain, and then I'm working in the studio with bands; I did the new Sabaton album, I just got done with Amorphis from Finland, so mainly I just sit down when I'm not recording music or on the road and just write.”

Hypocrisy's Australian tour will kick off a year where the death metal outfit remains Tägtgren's main focus. Then there'll be the new record and, apparently, plenty more touring. “We're going to spend the next year going everywhere. Hopefully we'll be able to play the moon.” So will Hypocrisy be the first death metal band to play outer space? “Absolutely,” the singer confirms. “We're ready.”

Hypocrisy will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday 16 January - The Hi-Fi, Brisbane QLD
Thursday 17 January - Capitol & Amplifier Bar, Perth WA
Friday 18 January - Manning Bar, Sydney NSW
Saturday 19 January - The Hi-Fi, Melbourne VIC
Sunday 20 January - Fowler's Live, Adelaide SA