[Interview conducted July 2005]

As Doomsday Machine rolls forth, the slow build-up from relative serenity to neck-breaking brutality is a perfect reflection of Arch Enemy's own rise from Sweden's extreme metal underground.  What began as a fusion of virtuoso guitar work and melodic death metal has evolved into one of the most devastating outfits on today's scene.  As good as 2003's Anthems of Rebellion was at getting the band's foot in the door, Doomsday Machine kicks it down and announces that Arch Enemy has arrived in no uncertain terms.  The speed, power and complexity the band is renowned for is accompanied by a heaviness worthy of the album's dreadnought namesake.  Just as the band was embarking on this year's highly successful Ozzfest outing, guitarist Michael Amott and mic destroyer Angela Gossow called in and were clearly amped and ready to conquer the world. 

Angela, a few questions for you first.  When it comes to death metal, you seem like something of a purist – would you say that’s true?
Angela:  Yes, my tastes in death metal are very old-school.  I like the dirty, unpolished, maybe out of sync production of the old Morbid Angels and Obituaries of the world, the life they put into it.  Today there are a lot of high-tech blastbeats and the feeling gets a bit lost for me.  It's maybe more extreme, but that's not the point and the musical aspects get lost a bit.

During the recording of the new album, I understand there was a very specific microphone you wanted to use.
Angela:  Yeah, a good old German one.  I wanted to use a hand-held microphone this time.  The normal ones you use live, they distort too much, like the SM58.  It's a great live microphone but way too much distortion so you can't record with that.  Our producer, he knows a lot about this kind of equipment and he said Sennheiser microphones, they have a couple of really good ones that they record like radio sessions with.  They interview a person against a really noisy background and it still picks up that person's voice very clearly.  So he went out to find one of these, the Sennheiser MD-21, and there's just a few left because I think they are form the '60s or '70s, really old.  He actually found one, we tried it out and it sounded great.  When you have a handheld, you move more obviously and the distance from your mouth to the microphone changes all the time, and that microphone picks up the same signal still, so you can't hear that even though it's happening.  That's very important when you're recording, that you don't get a very distant sound and a very close sound, but one that is always the same.  But unfortunately they don't have them wireless or I would use that live as well.  I hate wires so I have to always get a wireless.

I saw that sports was listed on your hobbies list – is that watching or playing?
Angela:  Oh no, I don't watch sports - it's painfully boring to watch other people run after the ball or whatever.  I'm very, very active, I'm one of those restless people, I can't really sit around.  I didn't do any sports until I was 24 or 25 because I was just working my ass off in an office.  I was tired but I couldn't sleep at all every evening, like my mind was tired but my body was wide awake, and when I discovered sports it solved a lot of problems.  I don't feel good when I haven't done anything.  When you go on tour, you do something every night, running around on stage, and that's a workout in itself, but when you're home… I can't just sit around.  I can feel my body getting restless and angry with me, 'Use the muscles you've got, you're fucking degenerating right now!' (laughs)  So I move as much as I can, I go running, I lift weights, I go swimming, whatever is possible.

All right, now a couple for Michael.  It seems like, after lead guitar was somewhat banished in the 90s, it is finally making a comeback.  What are your feelings about that?
Michael:  I hear a lot of attempts at lead guitar. (laughs)  I was reading Guitar World the other day and a lot of bands that you never thought would have guitar solos are saying, ‘We’re incorporating lead guitar, we’ve been listening to Iron Maiden, blah blah blah.’  And I’m just like…’Fuck you.’  (laughs)  We do it well and we’ve been doing it all the time.  For those first two albums, it was like we were standing there with a flag, going, ‘Hey, we play guitar solos!  Why is nobody behind us?’ (laughs)  Apart from the obvious people like Zakk Wylde and Steve Vai, but that is kind of a different style – in our genre we were kind of alone.  I think we were ahead of the game in that department.  But I sound kind of negative there and I’m all for it.  It just seems like there are so many trends in music now and metal as well.  People are so worried about what the other bands are doing and when one thing takes off and is successful, everybody wants to be exactly the same.  To me, that is complete bullshit.  Music should be from the soul, it should be from the heart.  It shouldn’t be from listening to what other bands are doing   I just prefer music by musicians who stay true to their… you know, if you were a nu-metal band in the 90s and playing no lead guitar, I think they should stay that way now as well.  There’s a lot of fakeness out there.

Japan was kind of the first nation to really embrace Arch Enemy.  Have you maintained that popularity in Japan over the years?
Michael:  It's still very good.  It's true, that was the first country that really picked up on the band and we developed a fanbase over there and we just stuck with it.  We still do at least one or two tours over there on every album.  I was just over there actually a couple weeks ago, I did some promotion for The Doomsday Machine.  We've been to Japan a lot in the last few years - this was my fifteenth visit since '97.  It's great, especially for me being kind of a connoisseur of hard rock and guitar music - everything is released over there on CD.  You just go to record stores and find all kinds of crazy stuff from these 70s bands that nobody gives a shit about in the rest of the world.  It's a pretty amazing place.

On a more serious note, I wanted to ask both of you what your thoughts were about the London bombings recently?
Michael:  I was in Japan on the promo tour I told you about.  I didn’t hear about it all day and then late in the evening, I called my manager – it’s 2 o’clock in the morning in Japan and I was awake, jet-lagged – I called my manager’s assistant in London, they are based in London.  I’m like, ‘Everything’s going well here, blah blabh blah,’ and he’s like, ‘Well, you haven’t heard what’s happened over here then’ and he told me about it.  It’s devastating, you know.  We spend so much time over there because our management company is based over there.  I don’t know… what can you say?  It’s just very disturbing.  I can’t really comprehend why people want to do stuff like that.  It’s like 9/11 as well.  Hard to comprehend what goes on in these people’s minds, being a complete atheist myself.  Whatever opinions I have, whatever views or values that I have, I don’t feel the urge to force them upon other people.  As a musician, some people get very political but I keep a really low profile.  I have my own beliefs and my own standards, but I don’t really feel the need to push them on other people.  I’m pretty tolerant I think.  We have a lot of friends in London, so we were all just calling to make sure people were okay and thankfully nobody that we knew was injured.

Angela:  We were in Italy doing promotion, me and Daniel, and Daniel's brother Adrian and his wife both live in London, around the corner from Liverpool Street, one of the bomb [sites].  It's terrible that it happened but at least there weren't too many causalities, I think 50 or 60.  It could have been much worse.  I see the reactions of the London people and I think they're very brave, like 'Fuck you, we're not afraid.'  I think that's the right thing to do because if you get scared by it, then they've basically won.  You can't make any place that safe, especially the Underground because there are so many people in there every day.  All you can do is just show them that they can't wear you down.  For us, it means there will be a lot more security at all the airports, which I'm actually glad about because you don't want anybody like this on your plane, but it makes things so much more difficult.  And it always hits the wrong people, you know, like innocent children, mothers, fathers on the way to work…  I don't understand how somebody can think that way.  There is something terribly going wrong in this world at the moment and I don't think that American politics make it much better.

Angela, last time I interviewed you, we talked about the role of organized religion in a lot of today's world problems - how about the political side of things?
Angela:  Well, the problem with Islam culture is the politics and religion are extremely mixed up, religion as politics and politics as religion.  I think that's why you can influence people that badly and make them do things that are completely…  I don't know.  If you read the Koran, it says if you kill somebody, you're not going to be in Paradise, you're going to be in Hell.  I don't know how they can twist and turn that in a way that you can get rewarded for killing innocent people just because they have the wrong ideas or the wrong religion.  That's what mankind does; people use everything to manipulate others, especially religion, and that makes these countries very dangerous at the moment.  I think that's why it's not going to stop.  They were born into that system and that belief, they get brainwashed from day one, and I think it's going to be impossible to stop that to be honest.  It doesn't really have to do with the religion itself, it is just what the leaders do with it, how they use that tool in a very evil way.  All you can do is try to reach these people and talk to them, inform them that there is a very different world out there.  It's really hard to change somebody's mind if he is getting fed that since he was a baby basically.  In Germany, we're a very democratic country and I think we are really lucky to be born in these countries and have at least some choice.  We can get some education, watch the news, and get some kind of objective opinion.  Religion is still very strong in the Western world as well and when you listen to what the Pope says, you're like, 'Oh my god…'  That's really fucked up I think, what he says about abortion and women and marriage.  Whenever he says something, it has a lot of political effects as well.  It's a dangerous combination, religion and politics, but it happens all over the world.

Our leaders here in America cross that line far too much, too.
Angela:  Yeah, like with the homosexuals - why can't they just let them do what they want to do? 

Getting back to the music, will there be an actual single from this album?
Angela:  Yeah, I think the UK is going to do it.  In Europe, [the album] comes out later than in America so I think that's what they're going to do, have a single for "Nemesis" and put a couple other tracks on it.  We already shot the video for it.

How did that go?
Angela:  Good.  It was over two days and we tried to get as much done as possible, so basically you end up shooting the day, the night, and the next day, that's how it always goes.  Everybody is always totally fried in the end.  But I saw the first rough cuts and they look really good.  I think it's worth the pain and the effort you put into it if you get a good video out of it.

What's next for Arch Enemy?
Michael:  We’re going to stay busy.  After Ozzfest, we’re going to have three weeks off, which we’ll probably need by then, and then we’re going to tour in Europe, headlining, then Japan, Australia, and come back to America after that.  That’ll take us up 'til Christmas basically.  Then Christmas off and start it all up again.  We’re going to come back to America 3 or 4 times on this album, that’s the plan anyway.  America will be absolutely sick of us by the time we’re done.

Looking at the band's message board, I see people from South America and India all begging you to come play in their countries.  Do you have any new territories lined up for this round of touring?
Angela:  We're definitely going to go to Australia this year because we haven't been there and it's a fantastic place to tour and we have a lot of fans who are begging us.  South America, I don't know.  We want to tour South America but we're looking for maybe a bigger band that we can support and ride on their back because South America is kind of a bit tricky when it comes to reliability of promoters and all that stuff.  I've seen a lot of bands try to tour over there and they basically had a lot of bad luck: half the shows got canceled, they didn't get their money, they were stopped by the police, that kind of thing.  So I think we'd be a lot safer [going] with another band that is more experienced in that market.  It would be great if Judas Priest would take us out. (laughs)