Written 10th March 2024
Ahead of the release of their upcoming album, Unextinct, on 22nd March 2024, Hotel Hobbies spent some time talking with Enrico Di Lorenzo of Hideous Divinity, diving into his thoughts about the band, the new album Unextinct (review here) and his experiences as an extreme metal vocalist.
Hotel Hobbies:Â The album release date is fast approaching. You must be looking forward to it finally being out there.
Enrico Di Lorenzo: Absolutely, I’m counting the days, counting the hours. Of course, I’ve already listened to it a thousand times but I can’t wait to share it with the rest of the world, well at least the rest of the world that is interested in it.
HH: It seems as if there is a lot of great feedback from fans based on the songs you have already released.
EDL: Yes! We have received more love than we are used to but it’s good; it’s beautiful.
HH: We will come to the new album in a minute, but just to look back for a moment - you have been with the band for fifteen years or so now. How would you describe that journey?
EDL: Well, it's been a long journey. I remember when Enrico Schettino, the guitarist - the other Enrico in the band - called me on the phone, asked me to join this project. The exact words were, Do you want to join a band based on hatred and disappointment? (Laughing). And I said okay! Jokes aside, it has been a long journey. We did a lot of things together and from the second album, the core of the band is the same. We just lost Julio on the way, the drummer. And now it is the three of us, plus the new drummer.
HH:Â There was a lot of praise for the last album. You also started to introduce even more nuances. Still a very brutal album but there were more moments of space that allowed that brutality to come through even more. On the new album, it seems you have done that again, kept moving forward.
EDL: Absolutely. You're absolutely right. It's something that started back with Adveniens, our third album. We started putting black metal elements in our music, or at least making them more organic with the rest of the music. Putting in some different movements and then not using movement. There's a reason why I call them different movements. With Simulacrum, we pushed a little forward, but without the necessary courage to completely go that way. When we started to work on the demos this time, I thought to myself if I compared them to what we did before, they were more similar to musical theatre than to the three minute formats for Spotify and the throwaway music of nowadays. I don't want to be misunderstood. I love fast and super short songs, but I can't believe that a lot of the music that people want to produce is two minutes, two and a half minutes. Some of it is consume-and-throw-away music. We are not marketing genius, absolutely. So we moved slowly to super long songs in which we can explore something different from what we have done until now. We didn’t invent anything but for us, it’s the first time that we arrange things this way. It’s similar to an act from a play. I wrote the vocal lines thinking about a musical performer, imagining a story to be told with different souls between lines. Like a different actor talking altogether. There are a lot of parts in which I just stayed silent because listening to the demos I said this part is so beautiful, I don't want to sing on it. I just want to listen.
HH:Â I have been listening to the album for a couple of weeks and have written my review. I have mentioned the excellent use of atmosphere. For example, for the opening of Atto Quarto I wrote that it feels like a thousand putrescent insects creeping across the strings.
EDL: Wow. That image is wonderful; we should use it! Thank you. It’s nice to hear things like that because we tried to build pictures with the music. Like that part you mention with the strings, breaking my voice that I use here and some other strange sounds. We used a lot of different bass in Atto Quarto and Leben Ohne Feuer. I don't understand fully understand Stefano's techniques sometimes, but it's a good technique. We like to think about movies, think about theatre, and thinking about other kind of media, not only the audio one. I’m glad it gave you such a strong image. It’s nice when it works; I love it.
HH: You have said you try to create pictures and elements of the album do come across as cinematic. I also like to dive into the lyrics when listening to an album and also when writing reviews. The lyrics for someone for whom English is not a first language are incredibly deep and rich in imagery. How would you sum up the overarching message of the album, if that’s not too big a question.
EDL: No, I like to answer these sorts of questions. Each and every album of Hideous Divinity has been based on a movie. We have done it with albums based on They Live, Videodrome, Lost Highway and now we are doing it with Herzog’s Nosferatu. Technically, the album is about death. We use Nosferatu the vampire like that’s part of nature. Not Mother Nature, but a both dead and living part of nature against the human being, against the human soul. Like the bad face of our world against which we struggle to fight. Like we try to fit in a place that is not intended for us, or at least is not yet intended for us. This is the Nosferatu we are talking about. We want to talk about vampires, but not the fancy gothic, sexy ones. So we forget about the charm of the vampire and accept them. This is what we needed. That's why we focused on the Nosferatu instead of other incarnation of the vampires. Don't get me wrong, Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of my favourite movies but first of all, there was no need to talk about that kind of vampire anymore, because someone already did that better than we could. We love the artistic production around that kind of vampire. We wanted to cover the other part: the violent ones, the monstrous ones, the disgusting ones, the hideous ones.
HH:Â The album cover certainly references this.
EDL: Yes, definitely. We really love it. It’s a cover based on a painting by Adam Burke. We gave him the elements and he painted this very big painting, actually. Then it has been heavily digitally modified by Dema Novakova, who is the woman in charge of our visual aspects. She's been taking care of us from the first album. She is behind most of our videos, and as we are talking, I will tell you that she’s sending us incredible images from the third video clip that we're going to release on March 22nd when the album is out. It's gonna be something incredible, incredible, incredible! I can't wait for it. The cover is a reference to Nosferatu, to the vampire, to The Last Voyage of the Demeter.  We have the Captain keeping the wheel but he’s already dead; we have the vampire feeding on him and the ship being moved by the storm. Â
HH: As you have mentioned videos, I was going to ask you about the video for The Numinous One, with you buried in the ground. It’s a great video to watch. How was it for you to make?
EDL: (laughing) I swallowed a lot of soil! We have a lot of footage of me just spitting out soil because no matter where they aimed, it was always in my mouth and in my eyes! So I drank a lot of water but it was clean soil. We made something creative and it’s been two months so I’m okay!
HH:Â It was worth it then! It is an amazing video.
EDL: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. We like to put something in the videos, like the video we did with Olivier de Sagazan. He is a performer that works with clay and we hired him for The Embalmer - the first video from Simulacrum, our last album. He made these gigantic masks that were put on us. In the video you can see him whispering in my ears and he was actually whispering terrible things in my ear. I could barely breath with a crazy man I just met (laughing) thinking oh my God, what’s going to happen. But it looked incredible. We try to put something in the videos otherwise it's just simple entertainment, which is okay, but we didn't write that material to do something just okay.
HH: I was trying to pick a favourite song and I think Mysterium Tremendum is probably my favourite of your performances. There’s so much range. From your guttural power all the way to shrieks that Travis Ryan might do.
EDL: Oh thank you! We first recorded Mysterium Tremendum as an anticipation. Last year, when we played at 70,000 Tonnes of Metal, we wanted to have something new. So we asked the record label and Century Media said we could pre-record the song but we would have to re-record it for the new album with something different. So we recorded that a year ago and then we re-recorded it faster, way faster. At that point, I already had the studio experience and I had been singing that song for almost one year. So I approached it in the most savage way I could. Except for the backing vocals here and there, it’s all one take. I tried to make it more grind and more punk. So that’s why I’m so happy you mentioned this kind of approach and something similar with Travis. He isn’t a technical death metal singer; he is more of a punk and grind singer, which is why we all love him. I’m glad you noticed it. I tried to make it in the most savage way possible. To make it less studio and more live. Stefano Morabito, the sound engineer at 16th Cellar Studio did a great job. My voice sounds natural. It is some strange arrangement between the mastering and the vocal compression. The vocal has quite a wide range in terms of loudness, so sometimes you hear that is not so loud and then we explode again. We try to keep it as natural as possible. I love Stefano Morabito's work. I think he’s a genius. I tell him. Every time, he never believes me. Never.
HH: For the sort of music that it is, it's a great sounding album. You have the brutality but you can still hear the different elements. Nothing’s lost. Nothing’s hidden.
EDL: I totally agree. I totally agree. He had the patience to listen to the songs before starting work on the album. We tried to get the spirit of the songs. And then he told us he had some ideas. I saw him doing strange things, especially on drums. I'm not gonna tell his secrets, but there are a lot of secrets for sound engineers in this album. I think sound engineers will love this album’s sound more than the music. They'll probably skip the music and just focus on the production.
HH: Combining the heaviness of the musical and the lyric depth, there is so much to dive into. You must revel in the fact the while the music is challenging, so many fans find it so rewarding.
EDL: I think the relationship between listener and music has become very fast. If someone says I only release music for me and that I don’t do it for anyone else, it’s a lie. If you do it just for you, don’t release it, just listen to it. If you release it, you are searching for someone who can understand what you do. If you are producing music, you have to give a first level. The first level is easy entertainment, yes, we can call it that. Our songs must be enjoyable also at the surface if you don't want to dig in the songs. Fair enough. If just want to listen to it and have fun, okay, we must give you something. But if you have time and if we are good enough to convince you to give it a second lesson, and maybe a third and maybe a fourth if you want, you can find more and it's not so hidden. Read the lyrics; follow the song and find a connection. It may be pretty easy and maybe not. Some people want entertainment and some want to dig deeper. We really hope our fans want to dig deeper. Fingers crossed.
HH:Â The different band members have been releasing playlists on Spotify about their influences. I have been listening to them and on yours, there is a lot of metal but also stuck in there is Duran Duran, a band I grew up with. I have quite an eclectic taste but it seems like you also do.
EDL: I listen to a lot of stuff. I'm not saying all music because I can't take reggae. I can't take it. With Duran Duran, for example, my friend was listening to them and I said wow, this bass line! Some people thought they were this sort of boy band but if you dig into those songs they are fucking incredibly arranged. They’re wonderful. They work on so many different levels. Century Media asked us to do those playlists. They directly asked for the songs that influenced us. Not necessarily the one you like the most or listen to the most. If I think how I became the musician I am, they yes of course there is some black metal and death metal. I started from that kind of sound. Even if I am a growler and a screamer and not supposed to ‘sing’, I always try to keep a melody in my head. I think of my voice as a percussive instrument and the kind of approach of the voice which I always try to keep, even if I am a growler, a streamer; I'm not supposed to sing actual notes, but I always try to keep a melody in my lines, to sing with a melody in my head and that's why there's some pop and pop rock in the playlist I did.
HH: I’ve seen your video about the muscles needed to sing. Thinking about the way that you sing, do you do anything particular to look after your voice?
EDL: I am a doctor, a voice doctor. So I work with singers and I treat me as a patient. They did a lot of research on extreme vocals on me and other singers too. Probably the first actual scientific study on extreme vocals and a lot of my patients are extreme singers, so I try to treat myself like I treat my patients and I try to behave the way I hope my patients behave. It means you cannot have a party every night. They always make jokes about me on tour because I act like a nun. I don’t drink that much and choose wisely what to eat. I try not to scream after the show. Try to sleep as long as I can and try to train a little. You have to respect the machine, otherwise it's not going to work. I am 44, but I always do some exercises to keep the brain connected with my lungs because more than the muscles is the ability to manage your air flow, which manage your power. On Monday I had a master class with more than thirty people speaking about extreme vocals, and I always, always say the same. Don't look at me because if you look at me on stage, I am (pulls an tormented, powerful face). But that’s part of it. I can growl sitting still, super relaxed and that’s how I really am when I growl and sing.
HH: So because I'm in the UK, I know the band have mentioned that you’re going to come back to the UK this year. Are you able to say anything more about that yet?
EDL: (laughing loudly) I can’t say because I can’t remember, I’m sorry. So it’s going to be a surprise for both of us!
HH: It has been brilliant talking to you. It’s been so much fun and extremely fascinating.
EDL:Â Thank you so much. It's been great and hope to see you at a show. I don't know where (laughing) but see you there!! Take care.
