“Yeah, things have happened pretty quickly,” he says, “but we’ve also been tour after tour after tour. It’s been good for us to see that after every tour it’s been building up to what it is now. It’s been steady, pretty fast compared to maybe a lot of other bands.”
So are you guys rock stars in Norway now? “Yeah, we’re not Justin Bieber,” he laughs, “but it’s definitely changed a little bit in the last couple of years.” This is at least partly due to that broad appeal, as previously mentioned. Fans of many different genres of heavy music can appreciate the music of Kvelertak, and they deliver their music with an exuberance that is truly infectious. Again, Vidar agrees. “Yeah, I would definitely say that,” he states, “that’s been our goal the whole time. Within the band we listen to a lot of different genres, so if we can please everyone in the band we can please a lot of other people I think.
“We did spend a lot of time before recording anything, we started out in 2006 and instead of doing a record and then finding a sound, we spent those first years getting everything together before we released anything, which I think was pretty smart for us.”
The band have visited our shores once before, which was for last year’s Soundwave Festival. Come mid September, the band will be here again, this time for their own run of headline shows. The tour pulls into Melbourne on Tuesday September 17, when they play the Corner Hotel, and Vidar is very happy that the band is coming to do their own shows this time around. “We’re really excited,” he replies, when asked how he feels about coming back to Australia, “last time was Soundwave, so we’re stoked to be coming back! We’ve only been to Australia that one time.”
Any memories of the Soundwave trip? “It was pretty much just one big party,” he chuckles, “and a lot of good shows. It was awesome, Soundwave was really good, I would say that our side shows were better than the festival shows. We did some really good shows with Gojira and Mastadon, and just had a lot of fun.”
Vidar also feels that the band have improved as a live unit markedly since their last visit, so Aussie punters coming to the shows can expect an even greater live experience than last time. “People will get a pretty good mix of the two records that we’ve done,” he reveals, “and I think they’ll see a better band than they saw the last time. Also, when we came over last time, our drummer went to surgery, so he couldn’t do the tour. So we had a session drummer, and he did a great job, but you’ll kind of see the real deal this time around.”
At this stage, after only five or six months since the release of the latest album, the band are focusing virtually all of their efforts on touring the world, and so not a great deal of writing is going on for the next Kvelertak album. But Vidar assures us that when the time comes, they will get stuck into writing their next opus. “We haven’t done much writing,” he says. “We have been working on one new song, but it’s far from done. We’re just focused on touring right now. Whenever it’s time to sit down and do something, I’m sure it’ll happen pretty fast this time.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
