Nights With Sydonia

“We've just been busy,” Dana Roskvist admits with candid good humour, when we ask the obvious question – what on earth have Sydonia been doing for the last couple of years? “We'd done a lot of stuff, all the touring we did a few years back, and then we did the Korn tour as well...“

Not to mention their 'Colin Richardson period', where the English producer famed for his work with, well, pretty much everyone who's anyone in hard rock history, including The Exploited, Machine Head, Napalm Death and even Slipknot, worked with them in 2010, resulting in the single Ocean Of Storms.

As a result of that single – which as Roskvist explains, “Colin did for us gratis, and I don't know what he usually charges. I wrote to his manager, because he had done a whole lot of bands we really liked,  and she fell head over heels in love with our music. She became our mentor for a while. Unfortunately she had a heart condition and passed away eight months ogo” he recalls soberly, “and all that went by the wayside. So we decided to do the album on our own, with an indie budget. So we've been playing a gig, then with the money from that we'd record a song.”

He admits that they've probably taken a little longer than most bands between albums, with their previous (first), released in 2006. “We've been trying to save to do the recording and producing. We've got an EPs worth now, which we're putting out, and doing a show for that at the Evelyn. But the album is now on its way, we have two songs completed already and two more being mixed now. Then, after the tour we're about to do, we'll get another two mixed, hopefully. It will be finished before the end of the year, anyway.”

Sydonia have been on the pay-as-you-go system, which has meant they've been touring and playing shows relatively regularly over the last couple of years. So why do they seem to have disappeared out of the public eye? “Maybe because we get no radio play in Australia,” Roskvist says with droll resignation. “After we toured with these great bands, it really helped us get a leg-up in the industry, but at the same time lots of people assumed we were a metal band. But there's a lot more to us, I think. But because they think we're metal, we get no radio play.“

Still, as your mum probably said once, time heals all wounds – and does wonders for your songwriting. “I think we've learned a lot more about songwriting in the last six years,” Roskvist says optimistically. “I think we've learned to cut the fat when it comes to songs, learned to emphasise hooks – not that we're trying to learn pop songs – and the lyrics are a lot more thought out. We've learned to compress our sound down a little, ask ourselves what part of this song is the cream of what we've come up with. As a result our arrangements are a bit simpler but the guitars are still intricate.”

He reassures frightened fans who may worry that they've lost their heavy mojo, that “there's still definitely a meeting of brutal and pretty in this album, although there's a bit more of an obvious rock-pop sensibility thrown into it.”

That should guarantee there's no sudden dent in their gratifyingly loyal fanbase, who have waited the six patient years for album number two. “I think loyalty from our fans is getting stronger,” he says.  “Recently, we've been getting the most exuberant shows we have ever had - and our last shows in Melbourne were really great. We already get requests for a bunch of the songs which we'll have on the album - there are only three or four songs we haven't really played live, although we always play a different set list every night.”