Intense And Their Growing Army

Intense's third release might be the beacon to signal the return of proper British melodic metal. With it's fine marrying of melody and heaviness, the album poses a question for melodic metal fans: "how come we didn’t hear of them before?". We spoke with the band's vocalist and founder Sean Hetherington about the band, a crown secret up until recently…

Hey Sean, "As Our Army Grows" is out in some places already, how are the reactions you're getting to it as of now?

Hi, Well it’s only just come out and it’s a little too early to tell, we’ve had some good feedback over here so we’ll keep on promoting as much as we can.

I personally think this is one of the best metal albums to come out of the UK for the last few years, and was amazed how come I never heard of the band, where the hell were you hiding?

Ha, ha thanks that’s great to hear. We certainly haven’t been hiding but just haven’t had a large label to help push us. With Napalm hopefully we’ll get to a lot of people who haven’t heard of us before.

Can you tell us how did you guys start out?

Early Intense was just a bunch of friends who got together a band and started to play, unfortunately that hardly ever works out *laughs* and things only got serious for us after the release of Dark Season on my own label Full Volume Records in 97/98. Just after that I parted company with the rest of the band as they were pulling in a different direction that I wasn’t comfortable for Intense or myself to be going in. I got together the guys you see today and Steve (Brine-bass) joined us 3 years ago so we’re a pretty solid unit now.

Why create a traditional metal band such as yours? The UK hasn’t been a stronghold for that kind of music since the early 80's…

Well I just wanted to play music, I didn’t consciously decide that Intense should play this style of music , it was the music we listen to so it was natural for us to play it. We’re certainly not a trend jumper band , we do what we do as you have to enjoy what you play I think and be true to yourselves. We’re very persistant and don’t really care if we’re “cool” or not *laughs* as long as we’re happy.

What kind of touring did you do prior to the release of this album?

Last year we got to play in Holland and Belgium for the first time which was great, we got some really positive reactions and were really well looked after even though they were small club shows. We love our festivals and in the past have played Bloodstock and 13th Day in the UK and Metal Bash and Dong Open Air in Germany. We’ve shared the stage with Sonata Arctica, Children of Bodom, Primal Fear, Epica, Finntroll and many more.. 2004 at Bloodstock we kicked off the main stage to a packed hall of around 2500 metal heads… it was superb.

The only other melodic band out of the UK right now is Dragonforce, which I consider a very different band than yours, their music focusing more on playing ability and yours more on song writing, what do you think differentiates you from other such bands?

Yeah we know Herman and a couple of the guys.. they are very different to Intense. For a power metal band we’re very dark an I’ve already had a couple of comments saying you should just be Metal *laughs* .. but you have to have a sub genre I guess. Our music is quite aggressive and we avoid clichéd lyrics, we do put a lot of thought into our music and songwriting as you suggested and maybe that makes us a little different to some of the bands.

Lyrically the album seems to deal in fantasy related subjects, is there a unifying them throughout it?

Fantasy with a small dose of reality for good measure I think, ha ha.. There isn’t a concept to the album, only in the trilogy at the end “The Chronicles of the New Flesh” which was written entirely by Nick. It’s his celebration to David Cronenberg’s movie Videodrome that came out in the 80’s. The songs take you through the metamorphosis the main character undergoes. It’s a great movie, hire it out if you haven’t seen it 😉

Did the works of any certain fantasy writers influence the lyric in the album?

Ha ha, I’d say a number of writers influence me in certain ways, David Eddings, Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks, I tend to read nearly every day whenever I can. I wrote the lyrics for Mirror Shroud on an idea from a book as the Mirror Shroud is a cape that is addictive to wear. It makes the wearer invisible and the more you wear it the more it changes you into a demon… I can’t remember the author though.. I read it a while ago.

What does the writing in the two sides of the cover art mean? In what language is that?

That’s Angelic Script. The artwork is based on the song Our Last Hope (As Our Army Grows is in the chorus) and OLH is influenced by the film Prophecy 3 The Ascent. I’m a big fan of the Prophecy series of films and they tell of a war in Heaven as some of the angels begrudge God’s love he has for man. When I spoke to Mattias Noren about the artwork I suggested he watched the film so he could see the imagery I was looking at … well he went out and bought it and came up with that cover plus he maintained the theme through the booklet. The sigils from the Angelic Script just seemed to fit and we use a sigil for each member of the band too. They don’t have a meaning in the way we’ve used them.

There are the obvious Iron Maiden moments here and there, were they an influence in such tracks as "Our Last Hope"?

I think Maiden must influence every single Metal band on the planet in some way and they ‘re definitely an influence of ours, I wouldn’t have said particularly on Our Last Hope but maybe Nick was having a Maiden moment ha ha.. (He wrote the music for it)

Being outsiders in the current US-oriented metal scene in the UK, how well are you guys treated by the media and metalheads out there?

We’re getting a little more press this time round as we now have someone in the UK to do that for us so that’s cool and general reaction review wise etc over here has been okay, we’re also getting tracks on covermounts etc it’s the best it’s ever been for us.. With our last album we struggled to get it reviewed by any of the big mags at all over here. The UK metal heads have always been pretty cool to us particularly since Bloodstock 2004, we won a lot of people over that day and most have stuck with us. We do need some big supports over here though to help us reach more people.

There has been somewhat of a resurgence of traditional metal in the UK lately, with such bands as Sabbat making a comeback as well, do you think this is something which is going to gain more momentum?

I really hope so, it’s good for a lot of the younger guys to be able to get to see bands they never thought they’d see and for older fans to remember so it’s great. As long as it’s a decent band I think only good things can happen from them reforming, it’ll be interesting to see what develops over here.

Now that the album is out, what kind of touring or festivals would you most like to do?

We love playing festivals so any we can get on this year would be great although already it’s getting a little late for booking, we also need to get on a decent support tour as that’s one thing that this band hasn’t had in the past and hopefully now that can be rectified. We want to play wherever we can and wherever there are people who want to see us.