© Dean G
After five full-length albums in thirteen years of existence, the brilliant Swedish heavy metal band Sister Sin announced the end of their project in 2015, shortly after we had the pleasure to see them playing a fantastic show at the Summer Breeze open air festival. A year later, power woman Liv Jagrell continued her career as a vocalist by founding a new band with harder riffs and a more varied singing. We didn’t miss the opportunity to chat with all the band members of Liv Sin just after their gig at the Rockhal in Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg) where they performed as an opener for Deathstars in November 2023.
Dean : Welcome to my home country! Liv, you once told me that you were just transiting it in the past, so tomorrow on your day off I hope you will find some time to visit the country!
Liv Jagrell: No, we can’t as we are travelling to Calais tonight in order to go to the UK.
Isn’t it a shame that bands almost just see the venues when they’re touring?
A band member: We try to get out as much as we can but we mainly just see the block.
Are you still under positive endorphins after this show or are you in relaxation mode now?
LJ: I’m probably more in the positive mood now.
BM: I get tired…
BM: I’m the opposite, I’ve got lots of energy!
Well, Liv, touring doesn’t seem to be really exhausting for you as I saw on Instagram that you were doing workouts the last days!
LJ: Yeah, we also did today but I haven’t posted it.
BM: We used the other venue as a running track. (laughs)
LJ: I think that it’s important to stay in good shape!
Do you still work as a personal trainer?
LJ: I did that but I don’t do it anymore.
So what’s your main job now?
LJ: I work at a veterinary clinic.
Many opening bands are mainly driven by passion and aren’t performing to make money...
LJ: Without passion we would not be here now because this tour doesn’t give us any money.
BM: There’s a lot of work behind the scenes as well, we have to work hard.
Your band had to go through tough financial moments, so you were appealing to the fans to support you. How is it going on since then?
LJ: We tried everything to gather some money and no to lose too much. But we knew that a support tour like this will cost money but on the other hand it’s promotion for us. Times were also hard for us as we couldn’t play weekend shows during the Covid restrictions, so we couldn’t save money and had to start from zero.
BM: We have to make it interesting for others to participate in this founding. We cannot say: “please help us!” and just sit there, we have to be creative and give something back.
At least you don’t have to practice pay to play!
LJ: No, I think I would never do that!
BM: I come from London and many bands practise pay to play there - this was a reason why I even thought of stopping to do music! There was a guy who got a lot of press. He hired session musicians and he paid for a huge amount of followers on social media. So his posts looked like he had 200.000 followers and he booked huge venues in the UK an in Europe but he was just playing in front of two people! So with social media you can fake your career, you can buy likes but you need real people in order to enjoy what you do. You just get true fans by playing shows. Not to say that we don’t have true friends in the digital world, but it’s a little bit more difficult to go to America and play there.
Nevertheless, the United States would be an appropriate country for your kind of music I think.
LJ: I think so as well but it costs so much money to go there!
BM: There’s a lot of logistics and every state is like a country, so the distances are huge and you just can’t play in the whole US when you’re only ten days on tour.
Normally I’m more into the extreme genres of Metal, so the main reason why I’ve asked for this interview were my excellent memories of 2015 when I discovered you at the Summer Breeze open air - it was such a great live performance!
LJ: Yeah one of our last shows with Sister Sin!
After a break you relaunched the band with new musicians under the name Liv Sin. Why didn’t you maintain the initial band name?
LJ: With the new guys it was a totally new band and Dave (Dave Sundberg, drummer, ed.) was still performing Sister Sin, so I couldn’t take that name. I also wanted to do heavier music instead of the old school rock’n’roll we did. Our music is more metal now, so it would have been weird to maintain the name. We have been a good band together but it was Dave’s band right from the beginning. He started it, it was his vision and I was just the singer in that band. Now I’m in Liv Sin which I started with my own vision. Although I enjoyed being in Sister Sin, it was not quite my music. I’m more into metal and now I can do with my voice whatever I like!
What about the others?
BM: I’ve played pretty much everything except classical music! I make my living as a guitar teacher and I started to play guitar with Nirvana as my into-music. After this I went over to more progressive stuff and 80s shredders like Van Halen. I always used to play in progressive Rock bands and my favourite band is Opeth. By the way, Skinny from Deathstars is a long time friend of Mika from Opeth (Mikael Åkerfeldt, guitar an vocals, ed.), so when he was talking of Mika I was like: “Oh my god, he’s my hero!” (laughs).
BM: My background is deathened black metal, heavy metal, more oldschool stuff, not the newer one.
Let’s come to your new album. Its title, KaliYuga, refers to the forth Hindu era full of conflicts and sin. Are you referring to our present world or to your own experiences?
LJ: To the present world. It’s getting worse with all the chaos in the world.
What’s in your opinion the biggest sin of our society or mankind in general?
LJ: Wars! I’m a pacifist.
BM: Touching Per’s drums! (laughs).
BM: I’m a pacifist as well, I agree with you. There’s a lot of humanity missing right now.
BM: There’s more “me” than “us”. It’s just black or white but for me it has to be grey.
In think though that in the metal microcosm there’s a strong feeling of unity. Even if you’re listening to totally different genres of metal you aren’t split into different camps.
BM: For some reason it has actually become better. Because when we were young it was like: “I’m listening to Metallica and you to Guns N’ Roses, so we’re not friends!” (laughs). Today we can hang out together.
In my ears, the album goes somehow further than the old ones from Sister Sin. For example, the track “King of Fools” includes classical rock hooklines whereas “The Process” is based on modern riffing. So would you agree with my appreciation that KaliYuga keeps the heavy metal soul but enlarges it with modern metal elements?
LJ: Yeah absolutely, that was our goal. We see ourselves as a modern metal band but obviously we have the roots in old school heavy metal, so I think you can feel everything of it. “King of Fools” is more oldschool. We wrote the album during the pandemic so we had all the time to experiment, to try different tunings as we didn’t have a deadline. So this was a good thing. I’m proud of that album, it is how we like to sound!
Was that sound influenced by Tue Madsen who did the mixing and mastering? I remember that Tomas Lindberg from At The Gates told me that Madsen had a strong influence on their sound too.
LJ: First, we had someone else who tried to mix it but we didn’t like the result. We then send our stuff to Tue and he did exactly what we wanted, he did a great job!
BM: Yeah, it was a “wow” moment for us when we heard it for the first time!
Can you please tell me more about the making of the album?
BM: Patrick (Patrick Ankemark, guitar, ed.) came with some kind of riff and we did some variations to it. After his we tried to play it together.
LJ: As we had plenty of time, we jammed a lot on this record. We could try a lot of things, some drums, some vocals and so on. BM: I love synths but Liv hates them, she doesn’t want our music to sound like symphonic metal.
Have you thought of doing the production all on yourself?
BM: Actually I was one of the guys who used to produce albums but I would say that I was more of a coach. When we went to the studio with Mike (Mike Wead of King Diamond, ed.) he told us that he doesn’t regard himself as the producer of the album but more like the recording guy.
LJ: We had to decide how it should sound and that was something new for us. This made me try much more new things, which was great!
BM: If you are in a studio listening during ten hours or so to the same track, you get to a point where you still don’t know if it’s good enough. So in this moment it’s nice to have a person to tell you that you can keep it like it is.
Liv, you have shared the stage with big bands like Slayer, King Diamond, Doro, Arch Enemy or Motörhead. What are your best memories of the last two decades?
LS: Well I have a couple of them but I still think of the Sister Sin gig in Moscow. The Russian audience is really great! We didn’t play big shows outside of Sweden but when we played in the Volta club, a venue for 1200 people, we first thought that this club was too big for us. We even got a press room and journalists came all over the day. Fans were in the hotel in the evening and the next morning they were still there, that was a very weird feeling! When we played the show, 800 or 900 people came up so this was a huge audience for us! For me this is one of the best memories I kept. I got teddy bears and a lot of other things. With Liv Sin we played in Tokyo an it was on of the best memories as well. We played as the first band that evening so normally the audience is smaller. But in Tokyo it’s the opposite! Most people came for the opening band, it was full of people!
Maybe because the have to work the day after?
LJ: Yes! (laughs) So the last band had a smaller crowd. But obviously I’ve got s lot of good memories as I did music for many years.
I think a lot of musicians would have been glad to meet Lemmy Kilmister.
LJ: Oh yeah, that was also amazing. Unfortunately he wasn’t in a good shape back then but it was great that we had the opportunity to support him.
Thanks for your time and have a successful trip to the UK!
LJ & BM: Thank you!