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Music

From Brotherhood to Baroness: An Interview with Pete Adams of Valkyrie

The Baroness guitarist opens up about his new album with the long-running Valkyrie. Stream a new track while you're here.

Seven years have passed since Virginia-based heavy metal outfit Valkyrie have released a new album. By most bands’ standards, that’s practically an eternity; lesser groups have formed and broken up in shorter spans of time. In fact, since 2008’s Man of Two Visions, guitarist Pete Adams has released two albums with his other band, Baroness, and toured with Samhain. But Adams and his brother Jake — with whom he formed the band in 2002 — are in it for the long haul.

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Shadows is Valkyrie’s third album and first for venerable metal outpost Relapse (preorder yours), and it’s a guitar lover’s dream. Riffs and solos come fast and frequently on its seven epic tracks, which split the difference between Iron Maiden and Thin Lizzy. “What you hear is really what happens when my brother and I get together and play guitars,” Adams says. “Obviously my brother and I like solos. We do a lot of ‘em — in fact they really start to take the place of where vocals could go a lot of the time, or should go.”

Adams recently spoke with me on the phone about a month before Shadows’ release. He took a break from spending time in the studio with his other band, Baroness, to talk about ending Valkyrie’s lengthy hiatus, the family bond that keeps the band together, and the long-awaited fourth Baroness album.

Noisey: It’s been seven years since the last Valkyrie album. How long has Shadows been in the works?
Pete Adams: We’ve been writing this one for a while. It really, it all boils down to what time everyone has to get together. So it ended up being stretched out over a long period of time. We’ve never been an inactive band. We’ve always continued to play and rehearse and get together. But trying to schedule time for us to get into the studio, a lot of it hinges on a Baroness tour schedule, and it also hinges on my brother’s schedule. He’s a full-time father of two and a school teacher. So it’s all about timing. But a lot of the songs have been in the works for about eight years. We’re happy to finally have them recorded.

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What keeps the band going, after all these years?
It’s really, I think, for the love of this band. My brother and I at many points along the way could have said, ‘Eh, this isn’t working.’ But we both really love playing music together. We kind of knew, when we started, that Valkyrie will always be a project. It will be a project 10 years from now, as long as my brother and I are always healthy, willing and able. And it’ll continue to be.

My brother and his wife left the country abroad to teach in Honduras for a while. So we did take a hiatus then. And Baroness was doing everything. So we got to this point where we realized that we were going to have to do quality over quantity in this band. So we definitely take our time. But it’ll always be a project, and it really is for the love of it.

Valkyrie

Does playing music with your brother contribute to the longevity of the project?
Yeah, absolutely man. We can totally go at each other’s throats about something and it’ll still be okay. It doesn’t cause us to want to leave. Maybe the other guys in the band are sick of hearing it. [Laughs] But Jake and I, we can fight like crazy and, some people might get into fist fights, but we got that out of our systems a long time ago. It is a family thing. My brother and I started playing guitar together when we were 9, 10 years old. And we really enjoy it.

I understand Baroness is also working on a new album — how far along are you in the process?
We’re actually in the studio right now. We are probably three weeks into getting this new record near its completion. And it’s going really well.

After taking on something as ambitious as Yellow & Green, what kind of direction are you taking on this record?
Well, I will say this: Not to give too much away, but this record, it’s a rocker. We definitely did a lot of experimenting with Yellow and Green, and a lot of ideas that we wanted to just get out. We were on a writing streak that year, so we just absolutely were cranking out songs. We have a new rhythm section now, and it’s the first time we’ve written with the new rhythm section. So we had a little bit of a hump to get over. And once we did everyone was super excited. It’s a rockin’, uptempo record. I’m excited about it. We’re all pretty stoked.