Interviews : Be'lakor (Steve Merry) – 15/11/2010

With the monstrous Sonic Forge Festival only weeks away we catch up with Melbourne melodic death metal band Be’lakor, a personal favorite of us at Metal Obsession, and a rising star in the Australian metal scene, for a chat about their recent European tour, and how their new material is coming along.

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Metal Obession: One of the biggest pieces of news for you this year has been your European tour, including the huge Summer Breeze festival. Was your first international trip what you expected?

Steve Merry (keyboards): It was probably better than expected – mainly because everything went really smoothly and we were able to fit a lot into a short space of time. The biggest thing about the whole tour was definitely Summer Breeze though, and we were just so happy to see that a good crowd came to watch us even though we were playing early. We’ve since heard a lot of good feedback, so it was a great experience for us.

Has it perhaps acted as a catalyst as far as hitting a few other countries; New Zealand, Japan, USA, etc? Or is that something for later down the track?

It’s helped us to get a good idea of what’s involved in planning and carrying out an overseas tour, for sure. We now know how much work is needed and also how much it can cost. Whether we’re able to get to some of the places you’ve mentioned will depend a lot on how our third album is received, and whether we can get any further label support to hopefully help with funding both the album and any subsequent touring. We haven’t discussed any specific plans in terms of a timeframe for future overseas tours at this stage, but of course, we do hope to continue to grow and do more touring.

Something I’m sure everyone is wondering is, how much new material have you got in the works?

We’ve got about two and a half new songs at this stage, and a lot of other riffs and ideas that are written but need to be discussed and refined.

How it it sounding in comparison to Stone’s Reach?

Really hard to say at this stage, given that we’re only now starting to really get going. But you can always expect a lot of melodies, and hopefully a fairly sombre mood with some high energy riffs to counter that. There are a lot of harmonised parts, too.

Can we expect any of the new stuff to sneak into your live sets any time soon?

Well, we are actually considering playing one at Sonic Forge! This isn’t confirmed yet though. It’ll need to have the lyrics finalised… or maybe we could play it as an instrumental. We’ll see.

So should we be expecting a third album next year?

We hope so. Being realistic, it will either be released late in 2011 or early in 2012. I reckon it might be early 2012, once you take into account the time that recording/mixing/mastering/pressing can take. We certainly won’t be rushing the song writing process. Sometimes we re-work the structure of a song several times and this album will be no different.

There was a bit of talk about a DVD release on your forums a while back. Is that still in the works?

I actually don’t know. There are a few different things that we’re talking about doing with Kolony Records, and that recording footage could possibly be used in places. It doesn’t look like there’ll be a proper DVD release of the making of Stone’s Reach though.

Other than headlining the Sonic Forge Festival later in the year, are there any plans for a few more local shows? You need to make up for such a long absence…

Probably only a few here and there. The thing about playing regular shows is that the rehearsal time for them tends to greatly reduce the amount of time you can focus on really writing new music. So we need to make that our priority, given that we spent most of 2010 either playing shows or rehearsing for the European tour.

Speaking of Sonic Forge, what other bands on the lineup are you particularly keen on catching live?

We are big fans of Okera and will definitely be keen to catch them. Primordial Space are a really cool band too, and it’s always fun to watch Dreadnaught play.

You can catch Be’lakor, and a stack of other fantastic bands at the following show: