Q & A: Olof Wikstand (Enforcer)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

TWENTY twenty-five will mark 20 years since Swedish heavy metal heroes Enforcer recorded their first demos. Originally the solo studio project of Olof Wikstrand paying homage to his idols and influences, the band has since released a steady stream of high-energy albums that pushed them to the forefront of what became known as the New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal alongside the likes of Wolf, Bullet, Crystal Viper and White Wizzard. With their debut Australian tour about to touch down, I sat down over Zoom with Wikstrand to discuss his band, but not before I had to chase a possum out from under my house just as he connected to the call.

Hot Metal: You might find some interesting examples of local wildlife when you’re here soon. It must be as exciting for you as it will be for your fans here.
Olof Wikstrand: “I’m super stoked to come to Australia. We’ve had, over a lot of years, a lot of people following us from Australia and we’ve never made it so far, so I’m super excited to come and meet all the people and hang out on the scene and make new friends and see old friends, also.”

HM: What’s it like for you as a band to be able to travel to somewhere like Australia, or anywhere, for the first time?
OW: “The first time you go to a new country is pretty a big experience. The first time you don’t know what it’s like before, and over time you know what it’s like. I feel pretty blessed to, over the past 20 years, take my music all over the world. I think we’re up to 50 countries that we’ve played in by now. It’s a pretty cool experience for sure, and once you back out and see it with a bit of distance, it’s a very cool thing indeed.”

HM: It’s also 20 years of the band. That is something of a milestone. What else has been happening with Enforcer lately?
OW: “We haven’t really talked too much … we’ve talked a little about celebrating 20 years, but it’s nothing we’ve made solid plans about. We released an album a year and a half ago, and we’re still riding that wave. Trying to focus on playing live these days and gathering material for what might be the next album. It’s to early to say. We haven’t done any solid touring this year because of personal reasons, but we’ve done a few one-off shows, maybe 15 or 16, so it’s so been a pretty hectic year anyway.”

HM: You’ve just said you’re not in a hurry to do a new record. It is still worth doing new albums? There doesn’t seem to be the financial incentive to make records. Do you stretch things out and just take whatever time you need now?
OW: “I think there’s several aspects to that. I think it’s more important early in a band’s career to put out albums more consequently. Now that we already have close to 100 songs on streaming platforms, eight or nine new songs is only going to be 10 percent of our entire catalogue. While you’re releasing your second album, it’s going to be 200 percent of your catalogue. So I don’t think that there’s that strong a demand to release albums every year in the phase of our career that we’re in now. It’s better to build up the demand a little bit and focus on live shows and when the time is right to do another album … when you look at pretty much any band that’s released seven, eight, nine, 10 albums, that’s what they’re all going into when it comes to a release schedule. Something like every two, three or four years, maybe. Something like that. You’ve got to build up the demand a bit and try to release it when the timing’s right. I could release an album every year, but it wouldn’t make any sense to do that at this point.”

HM: Does it make it easier to string together a set list when you don’t have such a huge amount of songs to choose from? Obviously there are crowd favourites, and plenty of your own too.
OW: “The songs we play live is a result of a trial and error process that’s been going on for years. You dig up some new songs and try them out with an audience, and you tend to stick with the songs that work better. The songs that are more fun to play are the ones that get a better reaction. The other side of it is that new songs can go anywhere. The songs we’ve played a thousand times by now can’t develop so much, because they’re so stuck in your system. The new songs have way more potential to grow and become something. They’re a bit more organic, because you haven’t played them so many times.”

HM: Sometimes those songs can change a little with time, but we like to hear songs we know the way we know them. When you come to a new territory, how do you approach a setlist? The fans who come to see you have probably been fans for a long time and know your material pretty well, but does that give you an opportunity to play some songs you might not have played for a while?
OW: “We have been putting together a 20th anniversary set prior to this tour, so I think we have an almost-two hour set prepared. I don’t think we will do such long shows in Australia, but in our arsenal at the moment we have a lot of songs from our entire discography. Exactly what songs we play will depend on the reaction, but we’ll probably play a best-of set because we’re playing in a new territory for the first time. I don’t think we’ll be focusing so much on more present stuff, but there will be a good mixture between all the different eras of the band.”

HM: When I first started getting into music it was often a bit of a struggle to find a lot of music that I would like to hear. Have you found that, now, there seems to be just too much?
OW: “I come from the same place as you do. I was born in the eighties and I grew up in the ninetiess, recording stuff from the radio and stuff like that. That’s where I come from. I can definitely miss those times, because with less music available, every piece of music that you owned was way more valuable for you. You were so much more attached to those records and those songs. When music is free and there’s no limit and so much is available now, it’s making music much less valuable, somehow. It’s just like a wear-and-tear product now. I’m still buying records and albums and I’m still doing all of those things, but it’s still not the same thing as chasing after it.”

HM: Does that make it more difficult for your music to stand out?
OW: “I don’t think that what we are doing would be possible without the internet and the way people consume music now. Because heavy metal nowadays is not like a local phenomenon – nobody knows us in my own town. It’s like a cult online, but at the local level, it’s tiny. I don’t think we could have spread out, we couldn’t have created this global niche without the internet, and without the way people are consuming music today.”

HM: Having that niche, as you put it, must in some ways make it easier because you’re not competing at such a broad level. You have a niche, and people know who you are in that niche, so that can make things somewhat easier.
OW: “I’m not struggling. My main struggle is not to become the biggest band in the world. My main struggle is making this niche bigger and bigger. It’s not just us, it’s all the bands who play similar retro metal – whatever it’s called – who all go under the same umbrella. I would like to look at it that way.”

HM: Retro metal like yours seems to get a fair bit of criticism from people you’d expect to like it. Do you find it’s older metal fans that are into what Enforcer does or do you also have a lot of younger fans finding their way to your band?
OW: “I can never make the older people who were around in the eighties like us more than they like their heroes. I like the stuff I grew up with and I have such an attachment to the bands I discovered as a child and as a teenager. Bands that I discover now, I can never have the same attachment to it. And I can’t count on people over 30 to like us as much as they like Iron Maiden. However, I can make a strong impact on the youth of today, where we will become their heroes in the way that Iron Maiden are my heroes, so we are, today, what Iron Maiden and Metallica, and those bands, were in the eighties. That’s how I’d like to see it. We make true metal available for today’s generation.”

HM: I’m glad you’ve expressed that, because I think there’s a lot of people trying to be their heroes rather than making themselves someone else’s heroes by taking what those bands did and bringing it to a new audience.
OW: “That’s the recipe for success that we’ve been using. The majority of our fans are – and have always been – around 20 years old. When we started out, we were 20 years old and we played to people our own age. Then even when we’ve had people growing with us, we’ve always had people in their early twenties liking us, and then times pass and they start their own bands and all of a sudden there’s a huge cult for retro bands!”

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