Stereoboard Talk To Mysterious Extreme Metallers Dragged Into Sunlight At Damnation 2011 (Interview)
Thursday, 01 December 2011
Written by Ben Bland
For those who like their music extreme, Dragged into Sunlight are almost the perfect band. Comprised of four nameless members who perform some of the most unholy, horrific metal imaginable, Stereoboard took the opportunity to interview one of the band’s mystery members backstage at Damnation Festival…
First of all it is great to be talking to you. Are you happy to be here at Damnation?
Yeah I am looking forward to it. There are some awesome bands playing here. There are bands here like Ulver and Godflesh who I never even envisaged myself seeing live and here we are playing on the same bill as them. That’s pretty awesome. We’ve got a lot of interviews lined up and of course we play a set too.
This is quite a diverse line-up as well. Do you think that’s important for a metal event like this?
Yeah, for sure. I think the diversity is amazing. I think a lot of savvy metal fans are into the diversity that the genre can provide. To have bands like Ulver and God is an Astronaut here as well as the really heavy bands is brilliant. We played with God is an Astronaut once in Prague. It was with them and Corrosion of Conformity…I think there had been a mix up with the venues or something so it was like two bills squashed together. A little bit bizarre but it was a really good gig that one actually. People got their bang for their buck certainly. I think it’s really great that at a festival like this you can go to different rooms and catch different styles of music. I think if you just go to a grindcore festival, for example, wall to wall brutality is just exhausting…too draining I think to be enjoyable.
Your live shows must get quite draining as well…
Yeah they do. They tend to be over before we know it though. We tend to play for about forty minutes but if people managed to find us after the show, if we haven’t disappeared effectively enough, they always go “Do you guys only play for ten minutes usually then?” We have to explain that we actually play for forty but such is our style that it is kinda over before you know it. We only actually play two songs, they just intertwine really well I guess. I think it works really well to be honest.
Before I first saw you guys live I didn’t really know much about you. In fact I’d heard you were a sort of doomy band and then I saw you live and I was a bit taken aback by how…well, extreme you actually were…
Everyone keeps trying to tag us as one thing. We tend to call ourselves “extreme metal” because that is what it is. We’re not a “death metal” band and we’re not a “doom metal” band. Our music is ugly and antisocial, it is extreme. We often get called “a doom metal band from Liverpool”. In reality only one of us lives in Liverpool, we’re actually from all around the country. A lot of people pigeon hole us incorrectly. I guess that is partially our own fault because we don’t give much away.
What is it that makes you want to create such intense music?
We just enjoy it man. We love cranking our gear up until the room is shaking. We are striving to create the filthiest sound possible whilst still having enough clarity to mean that people can actually understand what we’re doing. That’s important to us. Naturally the music is quite hard to follow. It is important to have the warm, resonant production sound that we try to have as well because otherwise the impact of what we’re doing wouldn’t communicate so well.
There are quite a lot of samples on the album (of serial killers). How did you go about choosing those?
That’s interesting…it was sort of an experiment. We were recording the record and our singer, who is interested in the “darker side of crime”, so to speak, found some clips on the net. He searched through a few and found the right ones for the songs. We tried it and it sort of worked we felt so we kept them. I don’t know if we are going to continue with it or whether it has a shelf life or whether it has become our signature thing. We’ll see I guess. We’re not intending it being a signature thing. It is just something that worked at the time.
It’s a couple of years now since “Hatred for Mankind” came out. How are plans for a new record shaping up?
We have lots of plans. We didn’t for a long time. The reception of the first album took us by surprise with how positive it was really. I mean, we nearly sold out of our first press of the album within two months, which was pretty insane to be honest. We have been working on this new release for a couple of years now…it’s called “The Widowmaker” and it’s going to be part of a sort of concept trilogy that we have been working on as a band. Then there’s something called “Terminal Aggressor” as well. We’ve been working on lots of different things, different arms of the band so to speak. We don’t want to be a one-trick pony so it won’t all be exactly the same in sound at all. Both of those two projects I mentioned are due fairly soon though I believe. We’re also working on a split with Gnaw Their Tongues, which is a guy called Mories from the Netherlands. He is a musical genius really…the most extreme music you can imagine I guess. That should be interesting. Then we are also working on a more direct follow-up to “Hatred for Mankind” as well. I have got no idea when that will be coming out though. We have a lot going on at the moment, a lot of stuff sort of floating in the air!
How do you actually go about the creative process?
Well most of the music is written by our guitarist. He has a unique approach I guess because he knows nothing about music at all in a sense. He’s not musical in the traditional sense but he ends up being able to write great songs. He’ll play a chord that you shouldn’t be able to play and make it work. We tend to just send riffs to each other, via the net or whatever. Then when we can we meet up and jam them out. We’re pretty busy people in general though so we don’t always have huge amounts of time.
What are your views on the metal scene as it is at the moment?
Well I feel that the band as a whole is quite connected and yet also quite disconnected as individuals from the metal scene at the moment. We’re all busy with our lives away from music, meaning that we can’t always keep up with what’s going on. In general however I think the scene is a lot better than it was a few years ago for certain. There are more people listening to good metal rather than image-heavy metal. It used to be “all gear, no idea” for a while I think but not now so much. I’m not going to name drop any bands or anything because there’s no point but yeah, I feel it has got a lot better in recent times.
Finally, seeing as we’re at Damnation Festival, I thought I’d ask you, as you are a pretty angry band by the sounds of things…if you could consign any one thing to eternal damnation what would it be?
That’s an interesting question (laughs). Erm, I don’t know.
I’d pick spiders…
You’d pick spiders. I like spiders. I get on with them personally. I think the main bane of existence these days, which has also been the main creative force of recent times as well I suppose, is the internet. So I would quite like to banish it to eternal damnation for, maybe a week or something…just to see what would happen in its absence basically. I’d like to do that to see what happened.
The incredible “Hatred for Mankind” is available now via Mordgrimm Records.
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That’s interesting…it was sort of an experiment. We were recording the record and our singer, who is interested in the “darker side of crime”, so to speak, found some clips on the net. He searched through a few and found the right ones for the songs. We tried it and it sort of worked we felt so we kept them. I don’t know if we are going to continue with it or whether it has a shelf life or whether it has become our signature thing. We’ll see I guess. We’re not intending it being a signature thing. It is just something that worked at the time. 
