Recently, I was flabbergasted by the debut EP from Widertod and had to write a short review for it. During my research on the band, I found next to no information about the band. Seeing I had to learn more about these guys (Alec & Marc) I reached out to them to see what’s what!
Greetings Alec & Marc, cheers for doing this short interview with us. Can you guys introduce yourselves and your band, Widertod?
Thank you very much for the kind words.
So far we are a two-man band called Widertod from Germany: Alec (guitar/bass) and Marc (vocals). We know each other for ages and have always made music together. We have a small studio with some friends where we work on all kinds of music. Since we both grew up with metal and have very similar tastes in music, more on the extreme end of the scale, we naturally had to create our own take on it.
My compliments on your debut EP, it blew me away! Can you tell us more about the EP and (first) reactions you guys are getting?
We are so overwhelmed by the feedback. Since this is a self-released EP, we couldn’t have expected something like this. Without Black Metal promotion this would not have been possible.
The EP has been a dream of ours for a long time and we are so happy with the result. It’s our very first release, which makes everything so exciting for us. We were very happy with the final result, but also very curious to see what other people would think about it. Based on the great feedback we’ve received so far, I’d say we’ve achieved what we wanted and were able to transport our spirit to people.
Have both of you played in other bands before Widertod?
We had a small death/metalcore band called “All Your Lies” about 15 years ago. That’s about it. But we still kept writing music together all these years.
I always love it when bands use various styles within their music. You guys are one of those bands (I hear death, black and a tiny sprinkle of metalcore). What are some of the influences that fuels your songwriting?
One of our all-time favorite bands is The Black Dahlia Murder, who also combine many of our favorite metal genres.
Dissection, Dark Funeral, TRNA, Der Weg Einer Freiheit and many more have been in our playlists for many years.
But our love for heavy music is very open, so we couldn’t help but create a mix of everything we love, just with a strong tendency towards the black side of metal.
While we are on the subject of songwriting, what does your writing and recording process look like? (as a two-man band)
The funny thing is that 70% of this EP is years old and many riffs have been lying around forever. At the end of last year we finally decided to take it seriously and give this child a name (Widertod). We sat down and worked on the structure and sound of the songs, so we had a very clear idea of what feeling we wanted each track to have. Then we came up with the topics and sat down to write the lyrics.
Morgenletzt is a very personal song about an intense period in our lives, so it needed to sound very emotional and powerful. It was the first one we finished and it just felt right.
Pater is a song about a father and his son who get lost in a snowstorm and eventually die. We tried to give the listener chills, as if you were in that icy hell with the two of them.
1890 is a tribute to one of our favorite authors, H.P. Lovecraft, and describes the process of a man slowly slipping into madness.
We recorded everything in our own studio, except for the drums, which have been recorded by a session drummer (who we would like to keep a secret).
The songs were then mixed and mastered by the great Nikita Kamprad of Der Weg Einer Freiheit. Since the first day of this band, we wanted to have him mix the songs, which also pushed us to do our best work. He did an incredible job and blew us away. It was exactly the package we were looking for.
You just planted your first flag in the ground with the debut EP. What’s next for you guys, what can we expect? 😀
We definitely plan to make an album. We don’t have a label behind us, so we’ll see what and how we can manage it ourselves. Anyway, new material is in the works.
Also, we’re working on some more WIDERTOD gimmicks right now. The tapes we’re offering seem to be doing very well so far and apparently people want CDs too, so we’ ll look into that.
Finally, do you have any final shout-outs?
First of all we would like to thank Black Metal Promotion for the great support!
Our friend Fabian (TAGMATA on Bandcamp ) for designing our band logo and the epic piano intro of 1890. We would also like to thank Jens and Guido (KRATZWERK on Bandcamp) for supporting us on drums and releasing this EP and Jochen and Martin (both BERSTEN on Bandcamp) for helping us with our music video.
And of course a big thank you to everyone who already supports us!!!