Frank sits down with the legendary Tomas Haake of Meshuggah to discuss his life and upbringing, including how he got into music as a small-town kid, his love for Elvis Presley, how Animal from The Muppets made him want to play the drum set, the cringe experience of writing his first song, the story behind how he became Meshuggah’s lyricist, the relationship and challenges he faces between the roles, his feelings on singles and shorter attention spans as a band that makes longer album-centric music, the challenge of drumming for Meshuggah with age, an update on his health condition and the story of how it began, his guilty pleasures and a whole lot more!
"With the years that we put in and still kind of the way I see it, we're still on this same lateral journey from what is mainstream metal, if there is such a thing in this day and age," said Haake on what Meshuggah tried differently on Immutable. "So you do tend to kind of… you have this niche and you know you're gonna wanna stay in there. We want to keep sounding like Meshuggah.
"So obviously with each album, it gets a little harder to come up with stuff that intrigues us and that we all feel like 'wow! This is something new. We've never sounded exactly like this before.' It's, yeah… you have the ingredients that sound the same, and you have like, obviously [the songs] have the chugging, like that kind of power chord chugging, and stuff like that. That's obviously something that we have to reuse, and we still have bass drums and snares and cymbals, and we have to reuse them. There's only so much you can do.
"But we really try our best to kind of make every part hopefully… with this album, I feel that too. We really try to make every part and every track different than something we've ever done before. Even though maybe to outside people it may not seem that drastically different or anything, and it's not drastically different I guess, but at least it has to be something that we feel is new. 'I haven't heard us do this before.' So that's cool. Then you get a thumbs up, you know? If it's cool sounding overall. It can't just sound like crap but we haven't done it, and that's okay."
Pre-orders for the new Meshuggah album Immutable are available here, due April 1!
