Interview: Lined

In June the Spanish death metallers from Lined released their new album, titled Soulcrifice, which DutchMetalManiac’s Henric van Essen reviewed here. Now, he also interviewed them.

Hello, how are you doing?

Hi 🙂 here we are, strange times to live in but looking forward hoping things go better.

Thank you for allowing me to interview you guys. Can you tell us a bit about the band Lined and its members?

Thanks for having us DutchMetalManiac. Basically, we are from The Basque Country, we like playing metal and we are ****** up like most of the people these days.

You, like strikingly many of the bands I have reviewed lately, hail from Spain. It seems to me the Spanish metal scene is either booming or displaying themselves more outside of Spain. Can you enlighten us on the subject?

Yeah, on one hand you have social media, that has an impact for sure, being active is so important nowadays and makes it easier than before. But we also think that there are very good bands around here working hard that made this “booming” possible.

The band name, Lined, does not immediately imply the fact you’re a death metal band. Where does it come from?

Our first singer came with the name and we all agreed 🙂 there is no deep story around it, at the time we didn’t mind to be honest.

Congratulations with your release, Soulcrifice. It has been a great pleasure to listen to. The obvious elephant in the room is the fact it is released over a decade after its predecessor. What is that all about?

Well, after our first album release, back in 2009, we made some tours and gave concerts. In the meantime we had our ups and downs, but we’ve been always working on the band keeping it alive, we felt that now was the right time for a second encounter, we have a strong lineup, we decided that was the moment to release another album and give a new life to the band, there is so much to be done yet.

The first thing I noticed is the new album’s title, what, if any, is the story behind that?

The history of the name is the idea of sacrificing your soul for a living in this nonsense world, we live our life nicely while there are lots of matters involving all of us with no solution found, making this world worse.

Can you tell us a bit about the process involved in the creation of Soulcrifice?

Normally, the creative process starts with Andoni (guitar) and Ruben (drums), they create the basement of the song, and after that all the others contribute with different ideas. Once we had the material for the album, we contacted Tristan from Auryn Studios, we know him, works very well and the result speaks for itself… better said, “sounds” for itself, very professional. To finish with the artistic process we contacted Adolfo “Warbanner” (Warbanner – Adolfo WB, freelance designer) , for the
portrait and all the design, and he really did a good job 🙂

What influences Lined’s lyrical concepts?

To be honest we have all sorts of songs, lyrically talking. We write about things we do not agree with or the things that we see are not fair in our society. Because for us, music is, among other things, a tool to change. We also write about more personal things, feelings… So our spectrum is varied.

What are your future plans with Lined? And please don’t tell me it’ll take another decade before a new release sees the light of day, hehe.

Hahaha NO, that’s for sure! For the moment we are re-planning our entire schedule (gigs…) for Soulcrifice, because the entire Covid thing has changed our plans. In this time we are getting ready for live concerts and preparing the direct show, and we are working little by little in new songs, riffs, ideas… So the plan would be, when all this finishes, make the presentation shows for Soulcrifice, and play direct shows. But we promise that we would
deliver new releases before another decade!

The Corona crisis has pretty much grinded the touring to a halt, what are your ideas on touring in the (near) future?

Yes, one of the most affected by the Corona has been the culture, and together with that, live shows. As said in the previous question, our idea is, when all this finishes, make a proper tour for Soulcrifice, play direct shows as much as we can to gain notoriety in the scene.

To wrap it up a final question that has nothing to do with music: Lionel Messi or Johan Cruijff?

We are not big football fans to tell you the truth haha, but are a little bit young for the Johan Cruijff era, so we haven’t really watch him play. We all grew up in the Messi era, so we suppose Messi would be the pick.

Thanks for the interview. All the best and stay safe. Is there anything left you would like to share with our readers?

Same to you!! I want to thank you for the interview, we pretty much appreciate it!! The only thing that we want to say is that if you don’t know us we invite you to take a listen to Soulcrifice, and if you like it stay tuned, because we have some fresh news coming soon.

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