The musical interpretation of balance  – An interview with EQUILIBRIUM

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It’s now official: EQUILIBRIUM will release their new album Equinox on November 28, 2025. There’s hardly any other album I’ve been looking forward to as much as this one in recent years! It remains to be seen how Equinox will be received by the public, but based on the singles that have already been released, it’s clear that a new era has dawned for the band. That’s reason enough for me to ask a few questions! On the sidelines of the Ultima Ratio Fest in Leipzig, songwriters Jessica Rösch and René Berthiaume took the time to discuss my most important questions. What musical journey awaits us? Why is there no Sagas 2? What connections to nature are there? You can read all this and more in the interview!

At this point, as always, many thanks to lightinmirror.de for the wonderful pictures! 

Also, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to listen to this album beforehand!

Shieldmaiden’s Voice: What is your greatest source of musical inspiration?

Jessica Rösch: For me, it’s definitely nature and folklore.

René Berthiaume: For me, it’s nature too!

SV: How does that manifest itself in EQUILIBRIUM?

René: For me, it’s always the case that I have a certain scene or landscape in my head in the form of an image. Sometimes I just set a landscape as my background image, and that helps me to create a feeling and perhaps find the first chords that allow me to recreate the image. So for me, a lot of it is expressed through the harmonies. I explore the question of how it would feel to be in that setting. When the singer comes in, he basically describes what is happening in that setting. But that’s always up to the person who writes the lyrics. For me, the setting or atmosphere is always a landscape, and I try to transform the colors into music. That’s not the case with all songs, but at least with most of them. 

Jessy: I think that’s generally the case with the lyrics as well. I always see nature, I always see images. For me, however, this is also represented in clothing, in texture, and also in the paintings, in the artwork. It’s all very natural. Nature always finds its way in there somehow!

SV: Jessy, you’re not actively on stage. Maybe you could describe what your role in the band is and how you became involved for those who don’t know you.

Jessy: René and I have known each other since 2008, so for a very, very long time. Around 2014 or 2015, I started doing smaller things for the band. At that time, it was mainly graphic design, merch design, and not actually music at all. I didn’t really have anything to do with music. With Renegades, the music came up because I wrote my first lyrics there. The plan was for me to join them on stage. But I’m a super introverted person, and it was so much pressure that I had a really hard time on stage. I wouldn’t say it will always be that way, but at the time, I was definitely not ready to go public with my music. I just had to find my own way into music first. In 2019, I discovered music for myself. I didn’t even know I could write music before! Now I’m mainly in the background for EQUILIBRIUM: I write lyrics, do the artwork, take care of the visuals, i.e., the appearance, the clothing, and the stage design. The new album was the first time I wrote music. It happened slowly and very naturally. 

René: I’m usually very sensitive about who I let get involved with the music. It has to feel right, and when people give us inspiration, it has to fit with EQUILIBRIUM. It doesn’t matter how close I am to people, but in this case it felt right. Jessy showed me the first few things without saying that it could be something for EQUILIBRIUM, and I heard it and thought, “Oh, that could be a good fit for EQUILIBRIUM!” That’s how the musical collaboration developed. 

SV: That’s actually the perfect transition to the album itself! You’ve now announced that it will be released on November 28, 2025, and will be called Equinox. Can you please describe what listeners can expect from your perspective?

Jessy: It’s a huge adventure and, for me, it’s a great journey!

René: We first released Bloodwood as a single, and in another interview we were asked to what extent this song is representative of the album. In my opinion, it is just as representative as Blut im Auge is representative of Sagas. Of course, there is a certain direction, but there are still totally different songs on it. It’s the same with Equinox. I would say it’s a surprise box! With Renegades, we took a big step towards modern sounds, and this step was extremely important for the development we are currently undergoing. We also let a few years pass, partly due to the change of singer and COVID-19. I wrote most of the music for Renegades on my own, and even though I cared about what people thought of it, I only thought about myself and asked myself what I felt like doing at the time. I just didn’t feel like doing all the old-school stuff anymore because we had already done that for all those years before. I wanted something more modern, and that was an important development. Now we’re at a point where we realize that we have the modern vibe, and at the same time, we’ve found our way back to older, organic, and even ethnic elements. Combining these elements with the modern sound was what happened with Equinox. 

SV: “Equinox” is the balance between day and night. It’s a kind of balance. What kind of balance do you want to achieve musically with Equinox?

Jessy: This name perfectly reflects what EQUILIBRIUM radiates musically. It’s precisely this balance. There are these energetic, powerful, and positive songs, and then there are these dark, gloomy themes. Both sides are simply reflected here. 

SV: One of the criticisms you often read online is that you should make more music like you did on Sagas. Why didn’t you go further in that direction with Bloodwood, for example?

Jessy: That would be too easy!

René: Yes, that would actually be too easy. There would be nothing easier than making a Sagas 2. But we’ve already made Sagas. Even if we wanted to make a Sagas 2, it just wouldn’t be authentic and we would only be following the voices that always criticize us. From an artistic point of view, that just doesn’t make sense to me, because you’re not expressing what you want to express, but what others want from you. Even if you ignore those voices, at concerts or festivals, for example, the new songs just work better live. The old stuff is over 15 years old… The feedback on the new songs is just much better live. That makes sense in a way, because in my opinion, except for two or three songs, Sagas is simply not suitable for live performances. The songs are extremely long in places, totally convoluted and multi-layered. That’s also the case with the new songs, but they are still always written with the idea that they will work live, that they are not too long, that they are not too complicated. They should sound good live, and that was always a problem with Sagas. We played Sagas in its entirety at a few shows and it was quite nice, but it’s just not suitable for a concert. However, we see EQUILIBRIUM as a live band, so playability is an important factor in songwriting.

SV: A common thread that runs through Equinox for me, and which can also be seen in the video for I’ll Be Thunder, is this return to more shamanism and spirituality. Why did you decide to incorporate these spiritual aspects into the album?

Jessy: I think it’s because it has taken on a greater role in our lives. If you compare it to Renegades from six years ago, we were personally on a completely different level. It first entered my life, then René’s, and it was just the next logical step. It happened quite naturally. 

René: When we started out, our first album was totally inspired by the Edda, i.e., Norse mythology. We reinterpreted those stories. With Renegades, there weren’t as many metaphors and side plots anymore. Everything was just much more direct. I always have a bit of a hard time with the word “spirituality” because many people confuse it with esotericism. What Equinox is, and what you interpret as shamanism, is simply the connection to nature, to our ancestors, and to the universe and everything related to it. 

SV: So it’s a bit like the embodiment of that?

René: Yes, exactly! We try to convey that both musically and through visual elements. We don’t want to represent any particular culture. Everything is inspired by everything else, just like music! With music, we never said, “Let’s authentically go in a certain direction.” Instead, we always took different inspirations and impulses and used them to create our own sound. 

SV: The topic of “authenticity” is perhaps not a bad keyword. With all the languages I’ve learned, I’ve noticed that I have a completely different relationship with my native language, German, than with the languages I’ve learned. One thing you read a lot online is the question of why there are no more German songs on EQUILIBRIUM. Why is that?

Jessy: It’s simply because EQUILIBRIUM is no longer a purely German band. We’ve had Hati for so long, and then Skar was also part of the band for a while. We all speak English among ourselves.

René: We really do speak English all the time. Since 2010, EQUILIBRIUM no longer feels like a German band. It’s an international band. But we also experimented from time to time to see if German lyrics would suit one song or another, and it just didn’t feel right for us. Should we force ourselves to go in that direction just because we were originally a German band? If it doesn’t fit, then it doesn’t fit.

Jessy: There was a song on the album called Anderswelt, for which I had actually written German lyrics. I thought the German lyrics were really beautiful, but when we listened to the song together with Fabian, it just didn’t feel authentic. The lyrics are beautiful, they’re there, and maybe we’ll make a version of it someday, but it just didn’t feel right. 

SV: That would have been my next question. I read the title of the song and was happy that there would be a German song on the album. Then I heard the lyrics and they were in English… I found that misleading, because people read the title and expect to hear a German song. I didn’t quite understand that, because you could have named the song “Otherworld.” 

Jessy: But that’s the beauty of some German words! There’s just no English equivalent for them. If I were to use “Otherworld” now, it would be somehow different and wouldn’t express what Anderswelt means. There are some words that are so much more beautiful in German.

René: It’s just our contribution to those who want German songs. At least the title is in German! [we laugh]

SV: But now to a slightly different aspect: Today you played Nexus, which is the last song on the album. Will the song be released as a single? Will there be more singles? What can we expect?

René: There will definitely be more singles! Nexus will definitely be released with the album release.

SV: One thing you said in a video at the end of 2024, René, was that there would be a longer instrumental. A Mana 2.0, so to speak. What’s the status on that?

René: That’s still to come! [we laugh] That’s the problem when you say something like that and then things change… We originally planned Equinox as Equinox Pt. 1 and Equinox Pt. 2. I definitely want to write an instrumental because I’m really excited about it. It has nothing to do with having to use any algorithms, because that doesn’t work when you have such a long song. I just feel like doing it! But that will happen in a different context. Once Equinox is released, we’ll get right back to songwriting. All the changes we’ve had, such as Fabian bringing in a lot of fresh air and Jessy’s songwriting, have made us a good team. We can continue right away, and we want to. After Renegades, we also had some internal problems, and I had reached the point where I didn’t feel like writing music anymore. That was also the reason why we had to make changes, because the energy in the band just wasn’t good anymore. But now everything is flowing again, so we’re not going to take another six-year break, we’re going to keep going!

SV: What makes the album particularly worth listening to in your opinion?

Jessy: For me, it’s the most coherent album, and as long as I know everything in and around EQUILIBRIUM, it’s also the most authentic album. 

René: I also find it very authentic. It has definitely turned out to be very diverse and surprising. I also think that, objectively speaking, the songs are exciting and cross genres. I find it very difficult to categorize. I feel the same way when magazines write that we are a folk metal band. That doesn’t sound right to me… “Epic Metal band” doesn’t sound right to me either. The album will definitely be surprising!

SV: If you could wish for one thing for the future of EQUILIBRIUM, what would it be?

Jessy: I wish that we could continue as we are now, because it just feels good. The energy and feeling of writing music is just wonderful because it hasn’t been like that for so long. 

René: Basically, we just want to keep going and play lots of concerts. We haven’t played much in recent years compared to before, and it’s also magical that we’re back on tour now. For me, concerts, traveling, and everything that goes with it are also a great motivation.