Six years after Under a Godless Veil, Draconian returns with In Somnolent Ruin, an album that feels both familiar and mysterious. With Lisa Johansson back in the band, their gothic-doom sound carries the same sorrowful beauty fans know well, but this time with an even more personal and reflective edge.
It is an album about philosophy, history, feeling lost, facing the shadows within, and waking from a long inner sleep: heavy, emotional and unmistakably Draconian.
M.I. - Six years have passed, and you have been quite busy. What have you been doing lately?
We've been busy, and, at the same time, we have not been busy. There’s a lot of water under the bridge since the last album, not only for Draconian, but also the world, which has, of course, affected things coming our way.
There's been a whole pandemic going on. There have been shifts within the band that took a lot of time to kind of figure out, and also the songs we were in. We started touring again. We could finally focus on the previous album. It took a couple of years before we could finally start touring and promoting Under a Goddess Veil in the sense of life, touring in the live shows.
I think we had to postpone the tour for that album, around three times, because of everything that's happening in the world, and of course things like this tend to affect people. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but during this time, after the recording of the album, Under a Godless Veil, our priorities changed a bit. Heike was kind of almost over it a bit and it was not just her, we had an issue with our drummer, so we had to use a session member for a few years. He's now a full-time member and things are in motion. We also have back Daniel Arvidsson. Since Frederik left the back in 2016, it has been an issue to find a bass player, and Daniel felt like he could do the bass and let's try and find rhythm guitars, and that was much easier.
So back in 2022, we asked Lisa if she would be open to do some live shows with us and doing the tours. She was very open to that. As time passed by, it became pretty clear that she was going to come back into the band and be replaced Heike after all. This was a mutual decision.
There were no bad things, we all got what we wanted. Surely, I hate to see somebody leave, but in the end, we need the band to work. It felt good to go back to somebody we knew, but it was in an updated kind of way. We realized as soon as we started touring that this is working right now, and we realize that we are getting much better during live shows as we've ever been before.
M.I. - Certain bands or musicians, tend to shape their sound following more modern music or trends. However, Draconian has been keeping the same formula and it never stagnates. In your opinion, what is the secret recipe for delivering such amazing records?
I guess during the 90s, we were trying to figure out what kind of band we wanted to be. I had an idea when I came into the band that I wanted to have something more melodic, more gothic, romantic style, and that was the first demo. It is kind of a child of its time. It has some black metal influences, some gothic metal influences, which started to get prominent at that time in the mid-90s and that's what we wanted to focus on, but then we stagnated after the first demo. Plus, in a town like ours where the musical climate was extremely hard during the 90s, very small town, there was not much to do and had a very slow emergence if you wanted to develop.
Yes, during the 90s, we struggled. We recorded some demos, we had all these ideas, but it wasn't until the year 2000, we really made a decision with one of our main songwriters that left the band, and Johan became the main songwriter. He started writing more music, and we asked ourselves if this was the path we wanted to take. We want to create the foundation to build it for the future. Then, we recorded that promo called Frozen Features containing more of a doom, gothic with female vocals, but we wanted to be a more doom-oriented band. That was when that foundation was built.
We never really made a pact or anything that will always stay that way, but it has stayed that way because it has worked out very well for us using that style of music. We got our (first) record contract as a result from the last demo we made called Dark Oceans We Cry, and that's when we first got to know Lisa, as a session vocalist, because she was working at a theatre in the town where we come from. That’s when everything changed, we realized quickly that the first two albums are the foundations, this is the core, this is the style that we need. Whatever we are doing, whatever we're inspired by, whatever direction we want to take, it's never going to deviate too much from that.
A lot of other bands completely changed direction. I never understand that, unless you want to change the band completely, change the name. I think we had a responsibility to ourselves and our fans to do what we love. We were dealing with very unserious booking agents, changes within the band. I would say it's not until the release by Sovran, in 2015, when things really started changing for us, when the world was opening, when we were actually ready to take on the world.
M.I. - In Somnolent Ruin is an album with a certain philosophical subject or theme related to one of the ancient civilizations of the world, which is Greece. Any particular reason?
I will say that Greece was what took these ideas into the Western world. They have existed before Egypt, or that they're just different variations, because culture changes, the linguistics and semantics. It's all the same thing in the end.
For me, I would say it's a little bit of a mistake in the press release that this album is about Plato's, the solo ascent or whatever. It was a little bit of a misunderstanding. It has always been there, this idea of feeling trapped in a world that you might not belong to, and perhaps that's the reason you feel alienated. It also can answer the problem of evil and misplacement and not feeling connected to a lot of people. Personally, I think that has always been the idea behind Draconian.
In the last two albums, I would say I took a little bit more of a philosophical approach, especially in this new one. I started getting into narcissism about 10, 12 years ago, and things started to be revealed to me that there's actually a whole belief system or spiritual philosophy that's been going on for thousands of years about something that I always felt.
It was not just the music itself, where I felt a commonality and a unity with other people. There’s some truth to it, in my opinion, that the shadows that are projected onto the walls of the cave might not be the whole reality, maybe there is something more and I would say, I do believe in mankind, I just believe that we are misled and we are not fulfilling our potential. I guess we are powerful, but we live in a world where we are constantly being told that we're not. I'm trying to talk about this a little bit in my own way in this album in particular, the title refers a little bit to the ruin that keeps building the longer you are asleep.
You have the Sophianic figure, which represents wisdom or wake the soul, but it's becoming more earthbound the longer we are asleep. We need to wake up not to some path that is God-given, but to someone who we already are. We need to wake up who we are already. And waking up from this slumber that is killing us and putting us further down into the mud. That’s what this album is about, but from a more personal point of view. I was writing a lot during COVID-19, and it was very difficult to know exactly what to put on this album. Me and Johan, we went through all the songs and all the lyrics and we started changing things, until the last moment we started changing things just for things to resonate with us.
M.I. - That’s quite interesting. As a personal question, did you study liberal arts such as History or Philosophy when you were young?
No. I've always been interested in it. I've always been a little bit of an outsider. I was very bullied when I was a kid. I had a lot of time to write and read and watch old movies while my friends were starting to get out and get drunk.
I didn't do anything of it until I was 30 years old and I'm not saying that this is something that I did, because I was an outsider. I'm saying that it gave me the foundation to ask questions, because I always ask questions. Yet, there's some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, maybe not literally, but the light and death and what it means, and also your role in all of it in consciousness. That's interesting to me, because that's the light experience.
M.I. - In Somnolent Ruin starts with “I Welcome thy Arrow”, which rapidly takes us back, Where Lovers Mourn or even Arcane Rainfell. Even after 30 years, would you consider, for example, whether this song would fit perfectly in these two albums or not?
I think that song is one of the songs on the album that fits most to that older narrative. I believe it's also a good way to start an album, because it gives that foundation to build on for what's coming, because even though the album is quite dense, I would say that it has a lot of different variables. It tells a story about the dream that I've had for years that kept returning, and I tried to make sense of it, which turned out to be a song.
M.I. - We also have “Anima”, which is also an interesting track featuring Daniel Anghede. As listeners, it gives us a perception of a loss or even deprivation. Can we say that the whole album is more personal than Under a Godless Veil?
Definitely. Under a Godless Veil tells stories more from a gnostic framework, I have seen the gnostic light now. I will always be interested in this subject. It will always paint the picture of what I'm doing, artistically, one way or another, unless there's something specific that I want to say… that's just who I am. However, the thing is that “Anima”, it's a Jungian archetype, and the shadow self, what we usually escape from, whether it's different kinds of vices or just watching the news every day or whatever, but it's still staring us back in the face. That's one of the problems of humanity. We haven't been able to face that shadow, we are constantly allowing it to determine our past in life. For example, see what's happening right now, everything is escalating; everything is becoming almost too wretched and evil to be able to explain.
When I was a kid, I never thought I’d have come this far, because in the back of my mind I thought that people are rational, but people just need to have it explained but it isn't that easy. Things have become so conflated and the waters have become so muddy so I would say that's part of a reality that hasn't been able or hasn't allowed themselves to face that anima, that feminine side, that darkness.
Jung said that you need to find the shadow when illuminated, otherwise you will never be able to integrate as a human being. You will always be afraid of something. It's a big part of who you are. This fear of the self is something that we see a lot now and all this play complains, egos everywhere. There is a part of self-discovery in that song as well. I'm talking about myself in that song as well, and I say, what the anima needs. It's an extremely interesting archetype to use, for all kinds of art, and it has always been that way, as it's based on a very old idea.
M.I. - On the other hand, we actually have “Asteria Beneath the Tranquil Sea”, which is one of my favorite songs in the whole album. This one in particular, I believe it allows Lisa's voice to echo through the cosmos. Was this on purpose?
It's a little bit of a breather to make things slow down a little bit. I'm using this title as one of the title goddesses that is connected to the moon, and the sea of tranquility is this rift in the moon, that broke it. We can say there is a story there about her and her sorrow.
She is also called Selene, the one who is lying in the moon cradle, and she's connected to the moon. I think the lyric speaks for itself. I didn't want to go through mythology, into the lyric itself. I wanted to make this title speak for the rest of it. It’s more of a self-doubt, from anywhere that can also tie to goddesses. I do believe that we are connected to the divine and there is a doubt that we can that we share, because this is the world of matter which is the ultimate solution.
M.I. - My last question. If you weren't a musician, what would be your dream job or profession?
I've been working a lot with healthcare, taking care of sick and old people, stuff like that. I like to help people, but I came to a time when your everyday life is about sickness and misery and medication and thinking about mortality, then it can only give you that much for your own life. You can't bring it home with you, but I don't know what I would have been.
I was studying film in university. I wanted to be a film director and I have written a couple of screenplays. For many years, I was writing, taking notes every time I was watching movies, how I would have done it and stuff like that. I would have wanted to work in the film industry behind the camera, like Hollywood blockbuster stuff or the more obscure and independent.
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Questions by André Neves
