Graveyard Is Dead Serious: Don't Call Them Classic Rock

Photo via band's Facebook

This story originally appeared on Noisey Canada.

Progressive Swedish rock outfit Graveyard have a complicated relationship with the “classic rock” and “retro metal” vocabulary that is often thrown their way in reviews. The band’s relationship with rock history has helped them book supporting gigs for antiqued rock groups like Iron Maiden, Motörhead, and Soundgarden on tour in the rock revering headquarters of hometown, Gothenburg. But Graveyard has never aspired to define itself by the past, and are wary of being measured by it. “I’d feel very uncomfortable if I felt I had nothing new to bring to the table in music history,” says drummer Axel Sjöberg. Guitarist Jonatan Ramm calls it a “dilemma,” meditating, “Of course you want to be able to explain your music, but it shouldn’t be easy to explain.” Graveyard’s music is something the retro acts they are regularly compared with could only have sounded like if they had taken hard, explorative turns into music’s left field. As Sjöberg puts it, “We don’t sing too much about wizards or dragons.” Incorporating electronic psychedelia, desert blues, and Swedish jazz in its mixes, the band’s nuance is arguably what has earned it a loyal following of its own. Just weeks ago, the band toured North America with Mastodon and Clutch, and on breaks between its tour dates, the band sold out headlining club gigs, including their first performances on Canadian soil.

With each new record, critics have praised Graveyard for progressing its sound. Upon Ramm’s arrival, sophomore output Hisingen Blues packed a diverse palette of guitar solos, backmasked vocals, (literal) whistles, and altogether progressive compositions that displayed a vast level of technical ranges. On 2012’s Lights Out, Graveyard set its sights on social unrest, stuffing its songs with political disenchantment and sloganeering, but Graveyard suggests their next record might be their most fully-realized yet. When the band decided to start writing new material last fall, co-founding member and bassist Rikard Edlund left the band, shortly thereafter replaced by co-founder and former Graveyard guitarist, Truls Mörck. Asked how the lineup adjustment has affected the band’s dynamic, Ramm insists “We’re very focused, which we’d never been earlier.” Since then, Graveyard’s finished recording 14 tracks at the Atlantis Grammafon studio in Stockholm, a national treasure that’s been accessed by the likes of ABBA, the Hives, and Robyn, and the same studio that midwifed Opeth’s death metal departing 2011 album, Heritage. Working with producer/engineer Johan Lindström of experimental/psychedelic jazz band Tonbruket, Sjöberg found it refreshing “to work with someone who’s not from the rock world,” and while the Atlantis sessions still have to be mixed and mastered, Graveyard is already projecting a September release for the new record, and a promotional tour cycle to go with it. Noisey sat down with Ramm and Sjöberg for a career encompassing interview discussing Graveyard’s experience with Swedish arts grants, quitting day jobs to focus on music full-time, and the road to their new album.

Noisey: There seems to be a tendency to try to locate Graveyard in this history of “retro” guitar music, and I’ve seen you reject that, pointing out how all types of music are rooted in tradition. Why?
Axel Sjöberg: It’s kind of a difficult discussion. It’s one that we’ve discussed a lot amongst ourselves. There’s no point at all in denying that we’ve listened to Black Sabbath or Fleetwood Mac. Who hasn’t? There’s also a very big risk of sounding a little pretentious, like you’re thinking you’re the best band in the world when you talk about this, but as far as our relationship to being labeled as “retro” or “stoner” or whatever genre you want to place us in, I think we stand firmly rooted in traditional classic rock. You know, we have guitars, bass, and drums, and we’re a rock band, but we’ve at least achieved a level of success where we can make a living out of our music and I think that’s partly been possible because we don’t try to sound exactly like big ’70s rock bands. I mean, we listen to that, but we also take in Swedish jazz, Somali desert blues, weird electronic psychedelic stuff and all sorts of different types of influences. And like you [gesturing to Jonatan] said in another interview, we want to make music we want to hear ourselves.
Jonatan Ramm: Yeah, and I think it doesn’t matter—it’s not a big deal if you walk into a store and we’re put in the heavy metal section. I think it doesn’t matter, but I think it would feel weird no matter what genre we would be placed in. We’re neither jazz or blues or rock or heavy metal, but there’s a little of everything in there I think. It’s a dilemma. Of course you want to be able to explain your music, but it shouldn’t be easy to explain.
Axel Sjöberg: I guess some of it has to do with our first album coming out on the label it came out on and some of the song titles on the first album. Now we’ve just recorded our fourth album. It’s sort of being mixed now, and I think this album will slightly change people’s perception of what type of music we play, even though it’s still rock ‘n’ roll. I just try to use rock ‘n’ roll and classic rock with a lot of different influences to try to make such a broad definition of it as possible instead of narrowing it down to “retro” rock. I’d feel very uncomfortable if I felt I had nothing new to bring to the table in music history or whatever, but it’s not like we’ve invented the wheel or anything like that.

Do you find yourselves responding to this kind of criticism or perception of yourselves when you sit down to work on new material?
Axel Sjöberg: Maybe subconsciously. When we do music we just go, “Oh this was good” and see what comes out of it and decide if it needs a synthesizer or if it needs more fuzz guitars. Maybe the lyrics are more intellectual—and that’s a stretch because it’s rock lyrics. But I think music-wise, how we structure songs with instruments has a lot more to do with gut feeling and intuition. It’s like—
Jonatan Ramm: “This feels right.”
Axel Sjöberg: Yeah, “this feels right.” And I think creativity is when you just feel “this is the way it should be” without having a logical explanation for it. On the other hand, when it comes to lyrical content, maybe we stand out from some other bands. We don’t sing too much about wizards or dragons.

Photo via label, Nuclear Blast

I read that Hisingen Blues took a long time to put together because you were working on it during your time off from touring and that you also did a lot of writing in the studio.
Jonatan Ramm: Some of it. But we redid a lot of the songs in the studio as well. Sometimes we had a lot of material for songs, but we redid them and did… “Longing,” the instrumental song, we kind of wrote that in the studio.
Axel Sjöberg: We just had some loose ideas and started building on them like a studio project.

Do you typically get your writing done in the studio?
Jonatan Ramm: It’s different every time, I think. This time we wrote every song and I guess almost all the lyrics before we were in the studio, too. This time we were more prepared than for Hisingen Blues, for example.
Axel Sjöberg: A lot of times in the history of Graveyard, no matter what—if it’s a recording or whatever—a lot of it has to do with us being victims or champions of circumstance. Where it’s like we met this dude and he knew that dude and now we’re on tour here with that band. It’s not like if someone starts a small business and has a five-year plan or whatever. Now we’re more able to plan because there’s people who want us to come play places. We were able to take time off to actually write and get well-prepared before the recording of the new album.

And how collaborative are these processes?
Jonatan Ramm: It’s different every time. Sometimes we just jam on a part and then we’ll go “oh that sounds good” and sometimes we bring almost a whole song, but there’s never… if I would come with a longer part or an almost finished song then Axel is doing his drums and everybody does the way they think it should be. Even if it’s a song that’s almost done we always change and rearrange.
Axel Sjöberg: Everybody that comes up with something, we’re very open towards all the other guys in the band to have input and opinions and we change and we change back.

What can you tell me about the new album?
Axel Sjöberg: We worked with a different producer in a different studio [Atlantis Grammofon]—in Sweden, a legendary studio that’s been around since ’60s or something; an old cinema that a big Swedish record label used to own; and it’s a really cool guy that owns it. He’s like 64 or something and he’s the engineer of the studio, too, and he’ll work with everybody. ABBA recorded there, and a lot of famous Swedish bands recorded there, too. So it’s a really, really good studio, which made it a pleasure to record in.
Jonatan Ramm: We had to play in a certain way sometimes to use the actual studio room because it was such a big room compared to what we’d been using earlier. You know, you can turn your amp as loud as usual or you had to turn it up to make it leak into the room depending on what you wanted, which was a very different way of working for us. And when you actually hear the room, it sounds amazing. It’s so much more powerful sounding.
Axel Sjöberg: I think it’s going to be quite obvious when people hear the new album that the production has been very different from the other albums. Not that it’s going to sound slick or like Nickelback or anything, but I think it will be more clear and open.

At least in North America there seems to be a tendency to talk about Sweden as this idyllic place with the best arts funding in the world. I’m curious if you’re at all critical about the way musicians are valued in your home country, especially after directing criticism at social hierarchies on Lights Out.
Axel Sjöberg: I think studieförbundssystemet is really great. When you read about Swedish bands in North American press they always go, “What’s in the water over there? What’s with this country that’s smaller than New York that puts out all these bands that make it over the Atlantic Ocean?” And I think studieförbundssystemet has a lot to do with it. It’s also the way our country’s built, but this past eight years, it’s been a right-wing government that’s sort of butchered the social security system and culture-wise they’re trying to say, “Oh, we love culture,” but it has to make a profit and it has to be financed by private corporations.

Growing up, I went to a lot of concerts that were bands that were being booked that were avant-garde or just some super weird mini-folk orchestra from a really weird country that in no way made any profit on the concert. But I think if you get a lot of different impressions, you incorporate that. Now, we’re a band that has enjoyed a lot of different cultural experiences that didn’t have any demands to make a profit, and now we’re putting tax dollars—or crowns; krona—back into the Swedish social security system. But I think overall that it’s a really good model and it helps people to focus on what’s important.

Jonatan Ramm: It’s a great way of getting a little help in the start. To actually be able to walk into a space and maybe you can borrow an old instrument or do whatever. Unfortunately a lot of the other cultural activity centers and painters get less and less support because of the government we’ve had for the last few years. But it’s definitely a good thing and it’s not like people don’t take advantage of that in anyway, either. It’s something they do because they’re interested in it.
Axel Sjöberg: It was built by the worker’s movements from the beginning to let workers educate themselves. So you can have studies circling painting, cooking, you know, it was for the workers to be able to enjoy or enhance their lives—get better life quality. It’s not big money we’re talking about, but when you get together and do things in groups to enhance your life, you can give. I think they get some funding for it from the [United States]—I think maybe you have it here, too—it’s called like Pop Camp? And it’s directed only towards young girls because the music business is such a sausage fest, it’s like everywhere you go it’s only guys—sound engineering, dudes in bands—so in the summer they have camps for girls from the age of 12 to 16 only to get them going with their bands. They make bands at the camp and they practice their individual instrument, and I think that’s a really great way of evolving the studieförbundssystemet and stuff like that. Because it’s scientifically proven that any… I hate to call it a “business” or “industry,” but it benefits from equality. I know people who work as leaders at those camps and it’s so rewarding for them to be there because they come back from those camps with a lot of self-confidence and go back to the regular studieförbundssystemet and take their place amongst the dudes.

Photo via band's Facebook

Have Graveyard or any of your other projects ever taken government grants?
Axel Sjöberg: I don't think you can find a rock band from Sweden that would ever say, “No, we’ve never taken anything.” When you’re starting out there might be a room full of instruments like [Jonatan] said and later you can get your own practice space but you can get small contributions to the rent or for breakables—strings, drumsticks and that type of thing—which really helps a lot. I think the hardest part was when things were just about starting to go good for us because we weren’t really financially beneficial yet; we had no time to work because we were touring or doing promotional stuff. One time—I think after a U.S. tour—we got this cultural grant or something, but I think that was almost even after we didn’t need it really.

Some of you quit your day jobs after Hisingen Blues so you could focus your attention on the band ahead of Lights Out. Were you at all nervous about leaving that safety net behind?
Jonatan Ramm: Yeah, but it was exciting. I think we were very happy because it has always been a dream for us to be paid doing what we love.
Axel Sjöberg: Even before that, I don’t know if you could say we had proper day jobs. It was working on and off or getting a job here and getting a job there. So I’d say it was more like going into a safety net and then leaving a life without a safety net, because it was a constant struggle. We were living on less than welfare when we quit our day jobs. We were like, “This is the money, we can get out of it and we just have to make that work” because we had put all this time into it and just said 'fuck it.' And I think for any creative person, when you take that step in your mind, you’re halfway to making it.

Rikard Edlund left Graveyard in October. Were you already recording when that happened?
Axel Sjöberg: That was sort of more at the end of the touring cycle before the record writing.
Jonatan Ramm: Whenever we were starting to write new materials, he decided to leave. And that’s sad, you know. But we kind of realized that it would become that way somehow.
Axel Sjöberg: It sort of had been cooking for a while but as of now we're on good terms. About a month before we went for this tour, my brother/tour manager, Erik, had his birthday party and we were all there and hung out and partied, so it’s all good. It’s sort of like when you broke up with a partner and then you’re just good friends because it just wasn’t meant to be. It can be a bit stale in the beginning, but we’re all good now.

How has this affected the dynamic of the band?
Jonatan Ramm: Of course it’s up and down all the time no matter what, but I think this recording went a little smoother because—
Axel Sjöberg: Everyone was on the same page and focused. Like everybody was locked in on the same thing.
Jonatan Ramm: And it was great earlier as well, but it didn’t feel bad or weird in anyway. It’s been very good to have Truls [Mörck] in the band. We’re very focused, which we’d never been earlier.

Tom Beedham is an arts and culture journalist living in Toronto. – @Tom_Beedham