Interview by Ali Williams
Spanish melodic death metal force BLOODHUNTER returns on June 12 with their new album, Sons Of The Abandoned. It has been both a long wait and a very deliberate one for the band. Four years have passed since the band’s previous album, and while fans have been understandably circling the release date like metalheads around a merch table with limited sizes, BLOODHUNTER have not spent that time idling around waiting for inspiration to knock. “It’s been a long wait until we finally release the album,” vocalist Diva Satanica explained to HEAVY’s Ali Williams, adding that the response from fans has already been overwhelming. “We are very thankful for that.”
For Diva, Sons Of The Abandoned is not simply another BLOODHUNTER record with the distortion turned up and the emotional damage left to fend for itself. This time, something shifted. The music still carries that death metal edge, but the album and its inspiration step into more exposed territory lyrically.
Diva admits that previously she had hidden behind the metaphors in their lyrics, but this time the writing became more direct. “It has been different this time,” she explains. “Usually, I feel like I hide myself behind the metaphors. It’s difficult when you play death metal to find this balance between speaking about things that everybody has in common, but without sounding too cheesy.”
That right there is the eternal death metal dilemma. How do you write something honest without accidentally sounding like someone has embroidered your pain onto a throw pillow? For Diva, the answer was to stop dodging the personal angle and write in first person for the first time. “It’s been a vulnerable stage of my life,” she says. “It’s the first time I talk in first person, so that has been a big change from the previous albums.”
When writing these songs for Sons Of The Abandoned, the band as a group were looking outwards, as well as in. Diva says the current state of the world, politically and socially, found its way into the record. It was not something she had always felt comfortable exploring in death metal, partly because certain subjects are more commonly expected in thrash, punk, or other genres where yelling at the state of the planet is practically written into the job description. However, she felt that limiting death metal to only certain topics felt increasingly wrong.
“If you think about what it shouldn’t be, you’re limiting yourself,” she says. “It’s important to talk about what’s going on and how that affects your music or you as an individual.”
One of the major themes running through this album, including the title, is disconnection: the strange modern curse of being surrounded by technology, information, noise and constant access, yet still feeling completely alone. We have never been more contactable, and somehow people still do not know their neighbours. Humanity really did invent ten thousand ways to send a message and then forgot how to knock on a door. Excellent work from the species.
Diva speaks about that loneliness with genuine frustration. The way people can live next to each other and remain strangers. The way the world can be burning in one place while another place carries on like nothing is happening. That uneasy distance between privilege, awareness and helplessness.
For all the darkness, though, there is still one place where Diva finds connection: metal, describing the scene as a kind of family, the place people return to when the real world gets too loud, too stupid, or too determined to make everyone miserable before lunch. Whether it is throwing on a favourite song at home or standing in a room full of strangers at a show, metal provides a sense of belonging that is hard to explain to anyone who has not felt it. For BLOODHUNTER, that community has been growing well beyond Spain. The band has already managed to break through some of the barriers that can sit in front of Spanish and Mediterranean metal acts trying to reach an international audience.
That emotional core seems to be the real spine of Sons Of The Abandoned. It is heavy, yes. It is aggressive, absolutely. BLOODHUNTER have not suddenly decided to release a ukulele confession album, and nobody needs that kind of incident on their calendar. But beneath the muscle and the growl, this record appears to be a band choosing honesty over safety. That willingness to experiment continues with the video arriving alongside the album release. Diva says it draws from the band’s own stories, showing different pieces of their lives and how music changed things from the inside out. One element follows the feeling of being trapped in the nine-to-five grind, with the boss yelling and the walls closing in, before music becomes the thing that cracks the whole structure open. “It’s gonna be a super emotional video clip for us,” she says. “It tells our own story from different perspectives.”
Sons Of The Abandoned is out June 12.
