POLISH death metal veterans Vader return to Australia at the end of this month, celebrating the anniversary of their fifth album Litany and its follow-up, the “Reign Forever World” EP.
Formed when his country was still behind the Iron Curtain in 1983, Piotr “Peter” Wiwczarek has guided his band through multiple incarnations from their earliest days of struggle in the years immediately before the Third Polish Republic to their current status as one of Europe’s most revered and formidable death metal bands.
After postponing their visit in the wake of the fuel crunch earlier this year, Vader launch their tour in Melbourne on November 25 and Wiwczarek lets us know what to expect.
HOT METAL: It wasn’t a great thing that happened to prevent you from coming here earlier in the year, but you’re going to be back here this month.
PIOTR WIWCZAREK: “Oh yes, we’re coming to Australia for the first time in over three years. We’re bringing a special set, of course. So expect something very, very brutal. We’re going to be playing a lot from Litany, also ‘Reign Forever World’.”Â
HM: It’s the 25th anniversary of Litany so it’s the perfect time to do it, but how important is that album to you?
PW: “To me it was the end of a change with the speed and the music, I think. Since the very beginning, Vader and myself, speed was the priority, so right from the very beginning, we tried to be faster and faster with our music. I think Litany was kind of reaching a limit. There’s no limits, of course, but I think with me, Litany was when I began to think that just playing faster and faster didn’t make any sense anymore. So we still have, and we will have, a lot of very fast songs, a lot of blasting songs. There are bands that just focus on speed in metal, but maybe we’ve touched a little bit of grindcore in our history. So I think that with the next album Revelations, that came out two years later, we started to show a little bit of a different face from Vader. We started to play some slower songs. We didn’t the style of Vader, because first of all we are a band that plays live, on stage. So we wanted to give ourselves a bit of a break, for our drummer, and even for our fans. I love speed, but playing 70 or 90 minutes of unlimited blastbeats doesn’t make much sense, I think. It’s good to have time to take a breath. But we stayed brutal, and we will, but since the new millennium, since Revelations came out, we’ve given a little bit more than just speed. Litany was definitely the most intense album in the Vader discography. It’s also one of the favourite of the fans. The old school fans!”
HM: Of which you have plenty. Vader is very much an old school band now, too. You’ve been doing this a very, very long time. All of your fans could be said to be old school really, because you’ve had such a long history.
PW: “Yes, over forty years now. We came out of Poland, so we had to wait almost a decade for a real start. In 2027 it will be thirty five years since the first Vader album The Ultimate Incantation came out. So next year we’re going to combine the first album with a new album. That’s the plan. So, we started in ‘83, but especially in Poland, when the country was still behind the Iron Curtain, so it was a different situation… we are seeing guys who are seeking something different to escape this boring world around them. We wanted to give some emotion, and take something from the music that everybody hated and we created something, and maybe we were feeling good because that was so unknown and unacceptable in music from what was around. So we felt pretty good causing an outrage. Poland in the eighties, when we started, was pretty much into politics. There was a time when big, huge changes started to exist, so everybody was into that. But we were teenagers who didn’t give a shit about politics anymore. We just wanted rock and roll more than politics. So we escaped into metal, and we started something like extreme metal. At first it was underground, because it was the eighties. It probably started like all the other bands in the world, but being from Poland we just had to work three, four, five times harder. We had no gear, no scene, no nothing! So we are pioneers of starting something that came out of Poland, and I’m proud of that! And I respect what I have today after all these years, because I know how hard it was.”
HM: I wanted to talk to you about that, actually. I’m old enough to remember the revolution that happened in Poland, and obviously you were there. How did you manage to get access to rock and roll music from the rest of the world? From my understanding, it was very difficult to get anything like that there, so how were you exposed to it?
PW: “It was. There was many sources. There were a few sources we had. The first thing, and it’s really weird, was radio, just regular radio. They had an evening – I’m not sure how to call it in English – where they would play whole albums. Today that’s not really respecting the rules, but we were behind the Iron Curtain then so that didn’t matter. So that was one of the sources. Some guys were brave enough just to play a whole album and we could record it on a cassette. We had vinyls, but they were absolutely crazy expensive, back then. Sometimes you had to work for a whole month just to buy one album. It was really expensive. But also, many many citizens of Poland had families outside, the US, Germany, whatever. And they were a source. Families sent records and we would travel sometimes across the whole country to tape a new record. Then trading started to exist in Poland, as well. We started to get in touch with bands in magazines and with friends, just to exchange music. That was way before the internet started! That was our analogue internet. We were also trying to arrange small concerts in cities and clubs and the youth centres, so we could invite friends and they would come and play with us. The scene was just getting started. They would come and start moshing and get crazy.”
HM: Of course since then Vader has influenced not only other acts from Poland, but probably a great number of others throughout the world too. It certainly is something to be proud of, inspiring others in that way.
PW: “I think it’s pretty natural. It’s everywhere. We had some aspirations, influences. I started with Black Sabbath. When I discovered hard rock. It wasn’t even called heavy metal back then. It was hard rock. Black Sabbath was my first touch of heavy music – and with the dark arts! Then within the next year I discovered more extreme bands. Bands like Priest, Saxon, Motorhead. That is the reason I was looking for more and more aggressive music. Then I was inspired by a live show of a Polish band called Art Rock. They were called Art Rock, but they played hard rock! I was standing in the crowd just in front of the bass player, and that’s probably why I started to play bass first. That was the time I met Zbigniew (Wroblewski), and we started jamming together, and we started Vader soon after that. In the meantime, Slayer came out with Show No Mercy, and they changed the meaning of extremity. Since then, Vader started to play faster, more aggressive. As far as I know, Slayer, maybe the first Metallica album, but certainly Slayer – they infected the whole of Europe. I was talking with Mille from Kreator, and he had the same thought. Slayer affected them so much, they started playing faster. That was the trigger! The real inspiration to play faster was Show No Mercy. That’s why that is so important to me as a musician. But I started with Black Sabbath. Black Sabbath infected me with hard rock, and I entered the underworld when I listened to the first Black Sabbath album for the first time. I still think it is important not just to metal, but to all of music.”
HM: You said earlier that there will be new music next year. It has been a long time since the last Vader album, although you released the ‘Humanihilty’ EP this year. You also said you will be doing something with the first album, so what is the plan with that?
PW: “The priority is the new album, of course. We’re not releasing albums that often like it was in the nineties. First of all, we’re more active, and we’re older. So we don’t have the same time, plus we have such a legacy of albums, and the albums have become classic for many new generations of metal fans not just in Poland, and that’s why next year is an anniversary of something important for Vader. Last year it was Litany, next year it is The Ultimate Incantation, but it’s not just this album. We’re trying to bring that album back for the new generation, but especially for the old fans so they can remember the good days. Next year we will also release a new album, and we start recording in January. I want to see it released in September so we can start promoting it in October. Next year is also the 30th anniversary of The Ultimate Incantation, and many, many, many people ask us for that. So we want to play the whole album as part of a set. It’s about thirty five minutes or so, I guess. The Ultimate Incantation was a collection of all the things we had done before. It includes the “Necrolust” and “Morbid Reich” demo tapes from 1989 and 90, also some new stuff we did in 1992. So it’s interesting for old fans, new fans, just to feel something we started with, and then fresh with a new album. That’s why I called it a combination of the old and the new.
HM: It’s kind of a double set on this tour too, isn’t it, where you’re playing Litany and “Reign Forever World”?
PW: “We’re not playing the whole of the Litany album, however we will be playing a lot of the album, and we are definitely playing ‘Reign Forever World’, because we did not play these songs for over twenty years. Of course I mean the (studio) Vader songs, not the live tracks or the cover songs. We will probably play a cover in our set, but it depends on the crowd. Usually we do it at the end of show, if it’s been good. So the main dish will be Litany and ‘Reign Forever World’, and then we’ll also do some of the older songs. All in all, when I compare this set list with the one we did in Australia the last time, it’s ninety percent refreshed and different.”
NOVEMBER 25: Croxton Bandroom, Melbourne
NOVEMBER 26: Crowbar, Brisbane
NOVEMBER 27: Crowbar, Sydney
NOVEMBER 28: Wreathfest (with Astrodeath, Southeast Desert Metal and more), The Black Wreath, Alice Springs TICKETS
