The Gods of Power Metal HammerFall are about to return with their brand new album Dominion, which is out on August 16th. While fans eagerly await the band’s eleventh album HEAVY Mag had the chance to sit down and talk to lead vocalist Joacim Cans about the hard work that went into the album that some critics are calling their finest.
“I think we are at a stage in life and the career of HammerFall where we needed to put out something solid and good to maintain the status,” explains Cans when we begin to talk about what the band were aiming to do with Dominion. “We need to keep HammerFall at the level where we want it and we wanted to conquer some new grounds. I think this album is so mature and so solid… I am so proud of it. This is album number eleven and I am so proud that this is just not another album that you put out to be able to go on tour because we put in so much time and effort into this to make it a proper release, and I think it is a release that will matter when we look back at it ten years from now.”
“I think when we released Built To Last (back in 2016), which I think is a fantastic album that album took us on a very long tour,” says Cans when I ask him what he means when he says Dominion is a vital album. “That took us back to North America for the first time in seven or eight times because we had kind of given up on the North American territory because it didn’t really work and we said ‘why waste time?’ But then we found people who truly believed in HammerFall and they wanted to put us on tour again so we went on a co-headline tour and I think that tour was a game-changer. For me that was one of the most amazing tours that I have ever been on, we didn’t play arenas we played smaller clubs but we had so much fun as a band – both off stage and on stage. And there we got some kind of momentum going in the band and then we decided twelve months later to go back and do a headline tour and we kept that momentum going and at that exact time we needed to start writing for the new album and seeing we were on tour we needed to be creative on tour… that was a first.”
You can listen to the full HammerFall interview on Spotify.
