Kamelot – Tommy Karevik

With the release of The Shadow Theory in April this year, Kamelot are on album number twelve and showing no signs of slowing down. I caught up with singer Tommy Karevik to chat about the band, the album and the upcoming tour to Australia.

Tommy began by elaborating on the new developments for Kamelot with the writing and release of The Shadow Theory: ‘It’s hard to say but we feel like we’ve found a new style for Kamelot with these two past albums. A little more modern, a little more straight than the old Karma-era and it’s really good with the crowd, it gets the crowd going. So there’s a couple of songs on here like ‘Amnesiac’ for example that have that kind of signature Kamelot feel but still have this modern formula… one song that was really going well for Haven was ‘Insomnia’ [which was] a similar structured song with a little bit of a hooky chorus… I was really excited to play that one.”

There’s more of a cerebral edge to the lyrics with psychological and dystopic themes merging with the modern sound: “Thomas [Youngblood, guitars] had the idea of basing it on the ‘shadow aspect’ from Carl Jung. Everyone carries a shadow and it’s basically your subconscious self. The more you embody that shadow, or the less you embody it to be precise, the darker it gets basically… then we packed this into kind of a story with a few cornerstones being the shadow, the shadow wall, the shadow key and the shadow empire… We still wanted to have one foot in the dystopic-futuristic world that we had in Haven and we just wanted to continue and elaborate more on that futuristic part of it.”

The new album The Shadow Theory, out now via Napalm Records and Nerve Gas.

We also talked about Tommy’s influences as a singer when discussing the new style on the album. He explained that: “I wasn’t into metal at all until I kind of stumbled on it one day meeting a guy in my class in school when I was 16 who was really influenced by Dream Theatre, Sonata Arctica, even In Flames, like melodic music and melodic singing… I remember listening to ‘The Spirit Carries on’ by Dream Theatre from Scenes from a Memory and I was just blown away, I was like ‘If this is metal, I like it!’… I started to sing because I loved how it sounded, I started to sing like what I heard even started to make demos on my little 16 channel/track, like a little recorder, and I was like, before I knew it, I could sing and I didn’t know how it happened really.”

Tommy was also keen to impress upon me the eagerness with which the band anticipated their upcoming Australian tour: “I really look forward to it because last time was a really cool experience. I always wanted to go to Australia but never had a chance to go, so it was awesome. It’s a totally separate continent way far away from where I usually live and, but it feels kind of similar to Sweden in a way… You’d think that if you’d travelled that far, travelled 24 hours, you would end up somewhere that looks completely different from your home… it’s a beautiful place you have much more sun and much more everything, but the feeling, the general feeling of the people is kind of similar.” He also explained the process for song choices when playing live, saying “First of all, [it’s about] playing songs that you know that the majority of people will know and like. Also, to put songs from the new album is important… but then, we need to keep songs that we know people go crazy for… So we always think about it, we always try to give something new in terms of maybe one old song or something that people from the old era would also enjoy. But when we see the reaction to the new songs, for example, ‘Insomnia’ ‘Liar Liar’ on Haven we were like ‘Man, this is awesome’, it’s so cool because you can see we brought new fans, new people, young people that love these songs and they for sure don’t know the very early stuff. We even tried to play for example, ‘Memento Mori’ even from The Black Halo on a few shows and basically no-one knew the song; it’s not fun then to play even though we want to play it.”

Tommy closed with one final enthusiastic comment about returning to Australia: “Everyone is very excited to go and yeah, just come out to the show, have a good time, that’s the way. Maybe buy some merch, support the music scene, that’s what makes it worth it for a band to travel the extra mile and come to Australia. We’re really looking forward to it, I can’t wait.”

Monday, 3rd December – Brisbane, The Triffid w/ Seraphic
Event: Kamelot at The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia

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