ARCH ENEMY Talks New Album – "Plenty Of Ideas Floating Around"

Spark TV recently interviewed Arch Enemy, and asked the band about their forthcoming live DVD, as well as the new studio album. A few excerpts have been transcribed and read as follows:

Alissa White-Gluz (vocals) on the live DVD: “Just a few days ago, we played Wacken, and we filmed the entire thing to make a DVD that will come out next spring. So it’s gonna be a live DVD with lots of extra material in there, just so people can experience Arch Enemy live, even if they haven’t had a chance to come see us yet.”

Michael Amott (guitar) on the follow-up to 2014’s War Eternal album: “There’s plenty of ideas floating around, and there’s even some simple demos and stuff like that, but we haven’t really seriously gotten into the songwriting process yet. But there’s a lot of ideas. But we’ve been spending so much time on the road, and we’re not really the kind of band that writes music on the road. I mean, we might come up with a little riff idea or a melody, or something like that, or a lyrical idea, but it’s easier to put it together at home when you take some specific, dedicated time to write and put together music. It’s a different kind of focus that you need, I think. You wake up in a different city every day, and it’s a different life, and it’s a little bit hard to focus on things like that.”

Alissa on the expectations for the next Arch Enemy album: “I think that for all of us, with any new album, or even just with any show, it’s always a challenge to do better than the last time. And I think that we all love War Eternal and it’s always gonna be super special to us, but we still wanna do better this time. It’s just a matter of always keeping very, very high standards and being critical on yourself but in a constructive way, so that you can always produce good music and good performances. I don’t think any of us are complacent when it comes to the quality of music that we’ve put out. I don’t think we have any specific ideas in mind for things that we have to achieve within the album, but we have a really strong lineup here that’s capable of putting together a really solid album. So we’re all pretty excited about it… Let’s not forget also that we have Jeff (Loomis, guitar) here for the writing process of this album, which we didn’t have with War Eternal, so right there we have a whole new world to explore. So that’s pretty exciting too.”

On August 6th, Arch Enemy performed at Wacken Open Air in Germany. The show was captured for the band’s next DVD / Blu-Ray/ live audio release. An interview with vocalist Alissa White-Gluz conducted prior to the show is available below, along with pro-shot video of the band’s entire set.

The setlist on the night was as follows.

“Yesterday Is Dead and Gone”
“War Eternal”
“Ravenous”
“Stolen Life”
“My Apocalypse”
“You Will Know My Name”
“Bloodstained Cross”
“Under Black Flags We March”
“As the Pages Burn”
“Dead Eyes See No Future”
“Avalanche”
“No Gods, No Masters”
“We Will Rise”
“Nemesis”
“Fields of Desolation”