Shindig! Issue #178 – Graveyard

“Fuck wasting time, fuck depression – let’s just go and do this album the best we can and do it fast and hard and have a lot of fun while doing it,” enthuses GRAVEYARD’s Truls Mörck.

Since emerging from Gothenburg in 2006, the band have infused their bluesy rock with monolithic Sabbath-style riffs, anthemic choruses, tormented lyrics and the petrol-soaked vocals of Joakim Nilsson.

Now they return with Fever, their best album since the seminal Hisingen Blues, marking a brutal return to the majesty of the early material with which they made their name, writes AUSTIN MATTHEWS

Longtime fans may wonder where Graveyard are heading next – and the answer appears to be a return to the drive and aggression of their earlier albums with Fever, which will be out on Nuclear Blast Records on 9th October. For this album the lion’s share of the material has been composed by Truls Mörck, with Jonatan Ramm also contributing a couple of numbers. “The main inspiration was touring and just the energy of the live shows,” claims Mörck. “I wrote a lot of the songs while on tour in 2024 with Baroness. Every night I went back to the bus with a guitar and in my mind, I thought how can we improve on this live set? (The show was) good but when I was fresh off stage I would think ‘I wish we had a song like this’ and I would try to write it. That was how it all started. That energy informed the writing.

“I feel some urgency with this one. The last album was more mellow, and slower. I wanted the albums to be connected but to be opposite, like yin and yang. 6 was more like an introspective album so I wanted the extrovert album now. I was just trying to get to the point quick without any detours. Try to find energy quick in the songs and just go for it.”

“Fever is a lot different from 6,” adds Nilsson. “It’s a lot harder, more up-tempo. Truls has been doing a lot of the hard work on Fever – it’s been produced mostly by him as well. We wanted to get this album out as soon as possible and Truls really had the stamina going. He had a clear picture of what he wanted to do. For us it’s time for a harder album, an angrier album. Truls really wanted to make a ‘true’ Graveyard album so I think he analysed how we sound and you could say we were inspired by ourselves! It’s not like some of our more introspective stuff – it’s more like the harder stuff.”

Indeed, a lot of the inspiration for Fever came from a former Graveyard member as Mörck relates, “We used to have a member in the band, on the first three albums, the original bass player Rikard Edlund. He had a special energy. He had a chaotic fire inside of him. He wrote a lot of the early Graveyard stuff. For this album I was really inspired by his sense of melody and the riffs that he wrote. I have to say this album is really inspired by him. Rikard had to leave the band for some personal reasons, but he will always be a huge part of our DNA.”

In recent years the band have all become fathers, though Mörck is amused when asked if the experience of paternity has led to the band mellowing, “You see that too much, I think! I don’t want to slow down just because I have a kid. I want my kid to look at me and be inspired. That just feels right for me. Keeping on doing this (with a kid): It’s harder but then you just have to work harder.”

The long five-year break between Peace and 6 was probably to the latter album’s detriment, and he admits a key motivator with Fever is to ensure the rawness and spontaneity of Graveyard’s gigs is captured in the new recordings. “I feel like with this album we wanted to get back to that feeling of the live show – the feeling of urgency and fever. That’s why we call the album Fever. I feel like I have to stop using my brain so much and go with the gut feeling, because that’s the only compass you have when you make music. You have to trust your gut feeling more, or else you’ll be completely lost. You can’t navigate by listening to other people, you have to always look inside and try to feel a sense of direction. That’s the most important thing you have as an artist and that’s what I try to do.

“I didn’t want to waste any more time. I was upset at how those years around the pandemic in 2020 went down and I wanted to make up for it. Fuck wasting time, fuck depression – let’s just go and do this the best we can and do it fast and hard and have a lot of fun while doing it. Let’s not overthink too much.”

To read the full article order issue #178. Better still subscribe so that you never miss an issue and have digital access to all back issues