With their latest album, Projector, the band has taken a turn to explore new vistas, utilizing clean vocals and a more organic sense of melody than before.  On the eve of the album's Stateside release, vocalist Mikael Stanne braved a hoarse voice and overseas connection to give me the low-down on one of Sweden's finest…

How would you say Projector differs from previous DT albums?
I think it differs a lot.  We tried to experiment a lot more with this album, to kind of break free from what we'd done before.  Going in and writing for this album was really different for us because we wanted to keep all alternatives really open.  We got back from touring a lot for The Mind's I and we were like, 'Nope, we don't want to play this really fast stuff anymore.'  We wanted to do something else, like focus more on the emotional parts of the music than we have in the past - take it a bit further.  And the vocals had to change for the music, but I think that's the basic change - it's more open, more dynamic, more emotional.

Were you scared at all how people would react to the changes?
Not really.  We thought about it, but we just said, 'This is exactly what we want to do,' so if people hate it, that's fine.  If people love it, that's fine, too, it doesn't really matter.  We just realized that we had to do this album, otherwise we couldn't go on playing.  We couldn't do another Mind's I or another Gallery or whatever.

Has the songwriting process itself changed any?
Yeah, a bit.  We're started writing using portable studios and computers and stuff, so we can make a lot of the arrangements at home and then present it to the other guys.  Then we work on it from there and develop each idea.  It's an easier process, since we know each other so well.  Also, our drummer Anders contributed a lot to the music now.  It's much more open and we feel we can do just about anything.  It's really interesting and kind of a new start for us.

Are you looking forward to playing the new material live?
Oh yeah!  This Friday is the first show, we're going to play a festival in Finland, so I'm really looking forward to that.

Why the title Projector?
Well, it came from the time when I was writing the lyrics, about a year and a half ago.  I was having problems sleeping and just a lot of problems that I didn't really want to write about, but felt that I had to eventually.  I started digging up all this stuff that I didn't really want to talk about and once I got it all to the surface, I had to see all these things from a different perspective.  That's why you kind of put your distance to it.  The more I thought about it, the bigger it got and that's what the 'projector' is:  it kind of blows things out of proportion in order to make it more real and to see it with fresh eyes and from a new perspective.  That's what it meant to me, to put light on small things and make them huge, make them a monster.

Could you tell me about some of the specific lyrics on the album?
They kind of deal with things that I hate, things about myself.  Mainly, weaknesses and errors and all the stuff that you do and you hate but you can't do anything about, you know?  I've come to realize that recently, that I do so many stupid things, I had to change my ways.  As a step towards being better, I write about it first and expose the problem.  A lot of it is about relationships between people, both my personal ones and other people.  Basically, what really annoys me about hanging around in the city with the people I socialize with.  The lyrics cover different aspects of this.

DT has always been blessed with cool artwork and I was curious how important the visual presentation of the band is to you.
We've always been interested in the graphic side and artwork and everything.  Me and Niklas always kind of developed the concepts for T-shirts and the covers and everything, so it's always been a big part of it.  For me and Niklas, anyway.  We drew the first demo covers and EPs and stuff, so that's always been going on.  Now Niklas is self-employed and doing graphics.  He really wanted to do this whole concept for the album, with all the involved imagery.  He does all the T-shirts and homepage and everything, to create an overall feel for the music.

I understand you've done a video for one of the tracks on Projector.
We just finished it the day before yesterday, actually.  It's for the song "ThereIn" and we did it with a couple of friends of ours.  We basically left ourselves in their hands and they did a video, which turned out pretty cool.  Not as good as we expected, but it's okay.  These kind of videos never get shown anyway, so there's no point in spending a lot of money on it.  It represents the song and represents us, so it does what a video should do, without being too much.

There is a major tour in the works for DT soon.  What details do you have so far?
Right now we're just doing festivals, but on September 17th, I think we start and go for six or seven weeks with In Flames, Children of Bodom and Arch Enemy through Europe.  It's going to be our biggest tour yet.  That will be a lot of fun.

Sounds like a pretty killer line-up.
Well, I think it is, it's a great package and we're all friends.  It's going to be crazy and hazardous to our health. (laughs)  Hopefully, we will do an American tour in November.  We've been talking about it a lot.  We were supposed to do it in August, but we didn't really feel right about that, so we'll do it in November, perhaps December.

Any new stops on this tour?
Umm…yeah, Poland, I think that's the only one on this tour.  We also go to Japan in September, just for a couple of shows, and that's gonna be great.  We'll probably go to Mexico as well.  After that, we can retire. (laughs)

Do you get to see much of these countries you visit or is it mostly 'do the show and move on?'
Pretty much just move on, yeah.  Sleep all day, eat, do soundcheck, do interviews, play, then leave. (laughs)  Sometimes we get a chance, though.  Sometimes we'll have a number of hours to just stroll around the city and that's great, but usually…  Like when we went to Rome, we were like, 'Oh, great!  We've gotta see this!'  We didn't see ANYTHING!  A big line of people, the inside of a bus, the inside of a club and that's it.  It can really suck sometimes, but it's great anyway.  The people are usually more interesting anyway.

Do you enjoy playing the big festivals?
We actually haven't done many festivals, just a couple small ones.  When we were with Osmose, they weren't into doing festivals, as they thought of it as a waste of time more or less.  Century Media is really trying to get is on the festivals, though, so we're doing Wacken this year and Friday this really big one in Finland.  A couple others, I'm not really sure yet.

How did you get in touch with Century Media?
We contacted the manager that we heard about and said, 'We want to have a record contract, can you help us out?'  So he sent out the record to several labels, and a lot of them were really interested and we started negotiating with like 6 or 7 labels.  Eventually it came down to Century Media because they were the most open-minded and agree to our terms more than the other labels.  We found out what a shitty, shitty industry that we're in.  All these labels wanted to change us, to have us re-record the album, and do all this and that and tell us what kind of image we have to have for the video, etc.  That's what we said in the beginning with Century Media:  you cannot control us in any way.  And they were like, 'Yep, totally cool, we agree to that.'

Did you have good luck with Osmose and Spinefarm?
Yeah, all these labels have been great.  Spinefarm did a lot for us in the beginning.  They aren't really a record label, they're more a distributor in Finland.  That's their main thing and that's why they are kind of limited in their capabilities.  Osmose did fabulous work and we cannot thank them enough for bringing out our records, but we just felt it was time to move on and since the album is kind of different, we thought 'let's make a record label change.'  It felt like the best thing to do.  Of course, it's been great so far and hopefully it will just get better.

Are you at all surprised by the level of popularity that DT has achieved so far?
Oh yeah!  We're just a couple of friends hanging out and playing, that's what we do.  Like in the beginning, when Skydancer came out, we didn't know what to expect, we just thought, 'This is not music that people get into nowadays, it's really a weird album.'  But people got into it and we were like, 'whoa! Cool!'  But it doesn't really affect us in that way.  At the end of the day, what matters is what we think about it and if we love it, that's okay.  If other people like, that's great.  But it's still really hard to think of it in that way and when people say that we were founders of this 'Gothenburg sound,' it's so hard to think of it that way.  We've just been playing forever.  It's nothing that we really think about, but of course it's very flattering that people buy the records and come to our shows.

DT has done a number of tribute albums and I was curious what your take on that whole market is and if there are any bands that you think deserve a tribute but haven't got one yet.
It's a fun thing to do.  It's flattering that a label asks us to do one, that they want to hear our interpretation of another artist's music.  It's an opportunity for us to go into the studio and record some more, and that's always interesting.  It's a challenge to do covers, too.  I don't listen too much to the tribute albums, but if there's one of my favorite bands that have a tribute album, of course I'm going to buy it.  Sometimes they're good, sometimes they suck all the way through.  I listened to this Depeche Mode tribute album, it was pretty good.  Smashing Pumpkins were on it.

How did you first get interested in playing music?
Like in '87, all of us in the band, we lived on the same street.  We hung out every day, just sat around listening to records.  We were nuts about music and calling up musicians and being really pathetic.  We were kind of bored, as well, just sitting around talking all day, so me and Nicky decided, 'Let's start playing and see if we can be as good as these guys that we listen to.'  So we started practicing and practicing and after about 5 months we decided we could play reasonably, and we asked our closest friends if they wanted to join a band.  They were like, 'yeah, why not?'  Nobody knew anything, so we just rehearsed and rehearsed, just to have something to do and our intention at the time was to do aggressive music that was also melodic.  That's more or less always been our goal, to mix the really extreme stuff like Kreator and Sodom and the mellow stuff like Helloween and Blind Guardian.

Okay, it's 1999 so here is the obligatory Y2K question.  How do you think things will turn out?
Of course there is going to be some problems, that's inevitable, but I don't think it will be such a big thing as it is all hyped up to be.  I spoke yesterday about it with a friend of mine who works at Microsoft, and he said everyone is calling in, really worried, and all this paranoia.  But it really isn't that big of a problem.  It's going to be interesting to see like the suicide rate on New Year's Eve is going to be.  I think it will be weird and a lot of people will freak out, but I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the show. (laughs)