It was nearly 25 years ago that rhythm guitarist Mårten Hagström joined the Swedish metal powerhouse. All those years later, and at the band’s studio rehearsing for a round of shows in South America, the axeman finds it hard to believe.
The brutal five-piece’s mammoth of a journey extends to their eighth release The Violent Sleep of Reason, dropping next month, and without hesitation Hagström asserts “Every time we release an album, it’s a rollercoaster both emotionally and mentally in many ways, because you spend like a year and a half working and rearranging all the material. Then you get it into your system and you record.”
“By the time you’re actually done and you let go of it, it’s more of a sigh of a relief (chuckles). The excitement also comes a year after, because then you really know what you achieved as far as your personal goals or what you wanted it to sound like… But when you’ve been off the road for a couple of years, it always seems good to step back into a regular touring cycle and do some proper traveling to get back into that mode. It’s always an on and off thing for us… We’re just ready to go.”
However, a heavy emotional downside for Hagström is “having a kid while on the road”, and the musician confesses that this is more damaging to himself than to his eight-year-old son.
“Yeah he misses his dad, and the first couple of days are rough for him, but then it’s business as usual (laughs). For me, there’s always something tugging and you get a bad conscience too, because you just know you’re away from your kids too much. Then again, this is what I do… My son sort of gets why I have to go away, and thinks it’s cool too.”
“His mum and I split up, so she doesn’t live where we do anymore. So I’m relying heavily on my mum actually to take care of him when I’m away, and that’s something that makes it even trickier,” he then admits.
“But everyone around me is very supportive, so I’m lucky. It’s the same for Fredrik (Thordendal, lead guitar), with us being the two dads of the band… It is what it is and everyone’s got their own problems, but you just have to deal with it.”
Moving back to the new album, Hagström accepts that there are “quite a lot of different reactions”, with one of his friends saying “Thank you for giving me some of the Chaosphere (1998) vibe again”, while another reflected “Oh this is a totally new direction”.
After hearing about one fan’s hope that Meshuggah are returning ‘back to their roots’ on the record, a reaction based on recently-released snippets, a bemused Hagström admits “I don’t know how to actually calibrate that, or what our roots are (laughs). I think it’s a question of what Meshuggah era you’re into.”
However, the root talk doesn’t end there as the guitarist thoughtfully reflects, “We’re going back in the respect that we recorded live again.”
“The last few albums, it’s been drum tracks with a rough guitar, then overdubs with bass and guitars, and the vocals come last. This time, everybody was playing it live, and if a take was good, that’s what we were going to use. It was even to the point where Jens (Kidman) was laying down the vocals live along with us playing the track. I think that’s the most refreshing thing about this album, that we got this chaotic vibe back in.”
Hagström maintains that it’s his and Thordendal’s transition from seven to eight-string guitars that has “helped us a lot to find a new way of sparking our imagination”.
“What happened was that we didn’t really go to eight-strings because we felt ‘Wouldn’t it be fucking rad if we added an extra one?’. We were touring around with tuning the sevens down to reach those frequencies that we wanted, but as soon as you did that, you would hear how the guitar would respond sloppily and didn’t produced exactly what we were looking for.
“So when we were talking to Fredrik Törnkvist from Nevborn Guitars, he was like ‘Well I’ve got some eight-string projects coming along that I’ve been thinking about doing, but didn’t see any reason for… You guys might actually need one of those.’ It was just a perfect fit.”
“All of a sudden, it was a clean slate, so it was really cool.”
The metal legends also wiped the slate clean when bassist Dick Lövgren joined the fold back in 2004. Musing about the group’s minimal lineup changes since 1987, Hagström feels lucky that this is the case, considering it “a strength in a lot of ways.”
“The first bass player Peter (Nordin) leaving was not a conscious move, he was sick and couldn’t play anymore. He was a great bass player and a very good friend (and still is), but he never contributed to the songwriting process. It’s the same when we came into Gustaf (Hielm).
“We were looking for a guy who could play our stuff and be cool to travel with, but nothing else. We didn’t want a new songwriter or anything. But it turned out that his vision for what we were doing was pretty different to what the rest of us had. So the move to Dick felt very natural, because when he came in, it was all of a sudden like ‘Okay. This guy approaches our stuff the way we need a bass player to, and more like Peter in the beginning.’”
“His impact has been the biggest as far as bass players go. This album is the first time he contributed to the writing process, and he and Tomas worked together on six of the tracks, while I wrote the rest of the four on my own. Dick has contributed with input that actually made a difference, and that’s why he’s been with us for so many years.”
Things turn nostalgic here as the guitarist pinpoints that the most significant aspect of the band members’ lives is “how it’s been so gradual, just slowly growing and realising stuff about your musicianship”.
“The funny thing is that what we’ve been doing for so long has been a rollercoaster (laughs). But from a musical standpoint, the first few albums are kind of in your legs. You don’t really know where you’re going, or the business… It’s a learning process, and those years we didn’t do stuff on a conscious level that actually made any difference.”
“But the transition from the seven to eight-strings was a big deal because all of a sudden, we didn’t feel any restraints as far as creativity goes. So that opened up things for the band and Nothing (2002), which was the first album we used the eight-strings for, was really important and made us grow because we toured very extensively on that one.”
“That was first album that we 110% immersed ourselves in everything that was to become what we are today.”
Celebrate the latest Meshuggah era with The Violent Sleep of Reason, available for pre-order here.
