The official lyric video for “Built To Last”, the title track of the tenth studio album from Swedish melodic metallers HAMMERFALL, can be seen below. The disc was released on November 4 via Napalm Records.
HAMMERFALL guitarist Oscar Dronjak: “We wanted to do something simple yet effective, so we recorded this in my studio during tour rehearsals. The computer effects give the video a really cool and unique atmosphere, and we’re super pleased with how it turned out!”
HAMMERFALL kicked off a European headlining tour on January 12 in Bremen, Germany. A North American trek with DELAIN will launch in April.
Drummer David Wallin recently left HAMMERFALL in order to focus on his family life. He has since been replaced by Johan Koleberg, formerly of THERION and LION’S SHARE.
Oscar recently told Distorted Sound about the songwriting process for “Built To Last”: “It was difficult for me this time, because normally when we write songs for an album, I need six to eight months without anything going on. I need to able to think about writing songs, and I need to be able to have that in my head all the time. This time, pretty much every other month we were doing a tour somewhere, so that disrupted the whole process for me a lot, which made it more difficult in the end, because it was more stressful, and I never got the chance to enjoy writing songs the way I normally do. When one song was finished, I just wanted to move onto the next one rather than finishing one song and being able to savor the moment for a while — I never had any time to do that, so it was a little bit difficult, but I trusted my gut instinct that the songs that I had done were good enough, that I would like them in the end and it turned out to be really, really good. I’m very happy with everything, despite the pain that I went through to create it. I believe the saying is all art comes through pain.”
Regarding the musical influences for “Built To Last”, Oscar said: “It’s the same things as always for me. When I’m in songwriting mode and I know that over the next couple of months I’ll be writing songs, I usually try to listen to a lot of the music that I had been inspired by over the years. For example, JUDAS PRIEST are always one of my main inspirations, and I have this thing that I do where I go back and listen to their albums chronologically; I don’t mean that I put it on at one o’clock and then listen to all of them in a row, but when I listen to JUDAS PRIEST, I always listen to the next album in succession. I started with ‘Rocka Rolla’ and then went on to ‘Sad Wings Of Destiny’ and, of course, onward from there. By doing that, I see the development of the band in a different way, because the first album I’d heard by them was ‘Screaming For Vengeance’, and then I listened to every new album as it came out, so for me going through the albums chronologically it gives me a sense of nostalgia, but also for me it’s a great way to see how JUDAS PRIEST has developed. I’ve done this with a number of different bands, KISS, MANOWAR, ACCEPT and KING DIAMOND as well. This is just a tool for me to find inspiration, basically.”
