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Articles : “A Really Heavy Pop Band” – An Interview With Adam and Emil (With Heavy Hearts)

By on May 22, 2020

The name With Heavy Hearts may not be the most well-known amongst Aussie heavy music fans, but that situation may very well change over the coming 12 months or so. The Swedish melodic death metal four-piece recently entered into a deal with Scale Records, a brand new Australian music management company run by Brisbane industry figure Jeremy Edwards, and the plan is very much to push the band’s music here and get them out to tour Down Under at some point in the not too distant future.

“Yes, that’s the plan,” confirms the band’s singer Adam Svensson, speaking from Hallsberg in Sweden, “just as long as Jeremy keeps me away from spiders and snakes!” He laughs, before continuing, “I’ve been wanting to go to Australia since I started listening to Parkway Drive, all those years ago, and watching that documentary about them. It’s just never happened, but I hope it will happen.”

“It’s a long way to come,” adds guitarist Emil Gustavsson, “but I think it will be worth it.”

As with many bands, there’s a bit of a funny story attached to the way band came together. In With Heavy Hearts’s case, it was back in 2015, and the two lads are happy to tag team the tale.

“It was started by me and Emil,” Adam begins the story, “we’d been friends for a very long time, and we said ‘we’d better do something together’. We like the same stuff, so we started recording a bit, and then by an accident, Emil, who’s a sound guy, had a job at a gig in Lindesberg where our bassist lived. The bass player, he was kind of drunk, and, Emil it’s better if you tell the story…”

“Yeah, I was there at my console, doing the sound,” Emil continues, “and this long haired guy came up to me, he was really drunk and he said ‘can I buy you a beer?’ So I said ‘yeah of course’. He came back with the beers, and said ‘hi, I’m Magnus, I play bass. I’ve heard you’re searching for a bass player. I’m the best bass player here, you need me.’ I took his number. He was so nice, and fun to talk to. He came and met me and Adam. He was really good, and a nice guy, so after that he was in the band.”

At that point, one element remained. “Then we all met up with Pontus, who’s the best drummer I know,” Adam says, “he joined and we started recording. Everything turned out so well, I quit my other band that I had at the time to focus on this.”

Within a year or so of being together, the band released an EP and a full length album, and did some touring with the likes of Scar Symmetry, Smash to Pieces and Sonic Syndicate. However, after bunkering down and doing plenty of writing from 2018 til now, they have decided to take a slightly different route with the short-term career, insofar as the release of new music is concerned.

“At this point, there’ll be no EP or album,” Emil explains, “we’ve just released the single In Silence, and we’re just going to release one single a month, every month til the end of the year from now.”

“We may put them together on a physical CD or something,” Adam says, “but we haven’t really talked about that yet.”

So what’s the thinking behind doing it that way, instead of the traditional EP or album route? “The thing is, I work so much with other bands who are really big,” Emil says, “I’m touring and touring so much with other bands, and the thing is that if you release a CD with 15 songs, people listen to something like the first three songs and then they are tired, and the rest of the songs are dead. And there’s so much new music coming out every day in the world, so people cannot take every minute to listen to this stuff, so I think it’s better to only release one song at a time, and then everyone can listen to that song.”

“And in that way we’ve always got something new coming,” Adam continues, “and we always stay current.”

“And it keeps up the interest, people are always seeing something happening. That’s the idea behind this.” Emil concludes.

For the uninitiated listener, the band’s sound resides quite fairly and squarely in the melodic death metal realm,  however, there are a number of other influences, heavy and not so heavy, making their presence felt in With Heavy Hearts’s music as well. “I like In Flames and the Gothenburg sound of course,” Adam says, “I also listen to Slipknot, Gojira, lots of Parkway Drive too, since I was about 14 and just getting into metal, so I’ve been taking a lot of influence from Winston!”

“It (the sound) is really melodic,” Emil carries on, “with elements of electronic stuff and the heavy stuff, and I think it’s a good mix between them. The structure of the songs is really like radio pop songs. I actually listen to the radio a lot to get ideas for the best structure of the songs.”

“So what we are saying is that we’re really a pop band!” Adam says to much laughter.

“A really heavy pop band!” Emil completes the thought.

Make sure you keep an eye and an ear out for the new single In Silence, and then for the subsequent singles the band are releasing across the course of the rest of 2020.

About

Rod Whitfield is a Melbourne-based writer and retired musician who has been writing about music since 1995. He has worked for Team Rock, Beat Magazine, themusic.com.au, Heavy Mag, Mixdown, The Metal Forge, Metal Obsession and many others. He has written and published his memoirs of his life and times in the music biz, and also writes books, screenplays, short stories, blogs and more.