“I do that constantly, but listening to it after doing the podcast interviews, I felt like I was hearing them again for the first time. “I started digging up old records again,” he shares. He burned off his excess energy by funneling it into the new material. Poulsen also listened to interviews that he did about the band’s history for P3 Radio Denmark’s Hvem et Volbeat podcast and found inspiration came from internal and external sources. This time, I thought, ‘Where do I burn off this fucking energy?’ I’ve been doing my morning run, biking, and training…” The live energy is gone, so it’s a different writing mode. “You let all that energy out, come home, and write a record. “Think of all the energy you use on the road and on stage,” he says. It afforded him time to pull out material and contextualize his own work. The pandemic-dictated time off meant he wouldn’t be writing parts backstage while on tour or while holed up in a hotel or on the bus on off-dates.
“I thought, ‘what the fuck should I do? I should just write a new album.'” While he was semi-joking at first, he realized why not just do it while he had the time on his hands? “Mother Nature told everyone to sit down and behave, and let’s see if we can get this pandemic monster out of the way,” the frontman recalls about the moment the band decided its next steps.
While this is a scenario that every band dealt with and will certainly lead to asterisks next to many album titles of this time, Volbeat used the isolation brought on by social distancing and the idle time of being in lockdown to charge forward in their songwriting process. Isolation and idle time can be either very good or very bad. For Servant of the Mind, Volbeat were forced to craft new material during the shutdown and quarantine necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. He found himself inspired and as a result, the music and lyrics just flowed out of him. “I was in a good place and mood while at home, and had a captive audience of myself,” he remembers. However, this time, he wrote at a decidedly quicker clip and completed the album faster than he did even in the earliest days of the band. That’s due to things like constantly being on the road, family matters, and various other distractions that life throws one’s way. “I wrote the whole album in three months,” recalls Poulsen, noting that the process of drafting a Volbeat album is normally two years in length. The song, in the tradition of 'The Garden’s Tale,' 'Maybele I Hofteholde'” and 'For Evigt,' features both English and Danish lyrics, and marks the first commercially released song featuring Stine singing in her native Danish. 'Dagen Før' offers a brief respite from the ‘thunder and lightning’ and features guest vocals from Danish artist Stine Bramsen, who is renowned for her solo work as well as being a member of the band Alphabeat. Album opener 'Temple of Ekur' returns to the ancient themes explored in past songs such as 'The Gates of Babylon,' while the epic album closer 'Lasse’s Birgita' explores the story of the first witch-burnings to occur in Sweden in 1471. Meanwhile, 'The Devil Rages On' looks at the idea of the devil taking human form. Weird stuff happens whenever I move into a house… it’s very otherworldly.”
“Every time you move into a house, you bring dead people with you. He is on a mission, speaking to darker forces and fallen angels.” Elsewhere, 'Shotgun Blues' explores the ghostly events he had recently experienced upon moving into a new home. 'The Sacred Stones' tells the story of “an earthly being who has committed himself to the dark side. The rest of the songs on the album weave intricate and fascinating tales. It became the band’s ninth No.1 in the format, which is a record for the most chart-topping singles by a band not based in North America. The lead single 'Wait A Minute My Girl,' which frontman Michael Poulsen drafted as a love song to his fiancé, swiftly cruised into the No.1 position on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Airplay chart and camped out there for three weeks. Thing.Įven so, Servant of the Mind, the band’s eighth album, takes the signature heavy metal, psychobilly, punk ‘n’ roll sound on which they have built their reputation up a notch. gold-certified) Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies, and have won multiple Danish Music Awards.Īt this stage of the game, Volbeat doesn’t have anything to prove. King Diamond)' from 2014’s acclaimed (and U.S. They have racked up nearly three billion cumulative streams over the course of their career, earned gold and platinum certifications all over the world, scored a Best Metal Performance Grammy nomination for 'Room 24 (feat. Volbeat are two decades deep into a career that has found them sharing stages with genre legends like Black Sabbath, Metallica, Motorhead, Slipknot, Megadeth, Anthrax, and more.
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