Zur deutschen Version geht es hier.
It’s been a turbulent few weeks for HEAVEN SHALL BURN: From the disruption of singer Marcus’ performance due to an infection at Rock am Ring to the recruitment of Britta Görtz from HIRAES as a replacement on the mic and the release of the current album Heimat, HEAVEN SHALL BURN have had to go through a lot. As big fans of the Thuringian band, there was no question for us that we had to get to the bottom of these events! We are very grateful that this worked out and that we were given this opportunity. You can find out more about HEAVEN SHALL BURN’s performance at Rockharz in the daily report that will be published shortly.
Before that, read here in the interview with guitarist Maik what the term “Heimat” means to him, what his highlights on the album are and how he has perceived the last few weeks.
Note from the author: In German, „Heimat“ is a term that describes a state of belonging that is opposite to feeling alien. While it is mostly translated with „home“ or „homeland“, the term carries specific socio-cultural connotations specific to German culture, nationalism, statehood and regionalism that cannot be fully translated into English without losing this specific context. Therefore, we will leave the term „Heimat“ as it is and not translate it further.
Huge thanks to lightinmirror.de for the awesome pictures!
Shieldmaiden’s Voice: What makes HEAVEN SHALL BURN unique?
Maik: What makes HEAVEN SHALL BURN unique? Mhm… I think you can see that quite well in the current situation, where our singer has unfortunately dropped out or at least has to take it easy now. You can tell that we’re a band that always operates on gut feeling. We don’t think too much about whether this is the right business move or whether we should have another meeting with the booking agency, management or record company. We just make a lot of decisions based on our gut feeling and so we called Britta and asked her if she would be interested in singing for us. This gut decision turned out to be a total stroke of luck. That’s exactly what makes us special: We don’t take ourselves too seriously and as a result, we’ve always been in the same vibe with our fans over the years and decades of our band’s history. It’s really quite rare for the fan community to think: “Wow, what are they doing now?” It’s more of a “resonance feedback”. But HEAVEN SHALL BURN is my only band, so I can’t judge if that’s something special because I don’t have much band experience with other bands.
SV: What would you say influences your music the most?
Maik: HEAVEN SHALL BURN was founded to express our political opinion. I always tell the story that I used to write articles for the school newspaper and hardly anyone was interested. But when you sat around the campfire with your guitar, suddenly everyone listened to you. That was somehow a key experience for me, that you could simply combine the lyrics with music. When you listen to bands like MORBID ANGEL or DREAM THEATER, they are bands that have a musical vision that they realize and that exist as art forms of music. The thing that drives HEAVEN SHALL BURN forward is the attitude. We want to tell people what we think, take people with us, at best encourage them to do something positive with their lives and music is more of a vehicle for that. We think more about our attitude and not so much about the music.
SV: Your latest album Heimat was released recently. What role does the concept of “Heimat” play for you in general?
Maik: The concept of “Heimat” doesn’t exist. The basic idea is that everyone should think for themselves about what “Heimat” means to them. This unhealthy situation where some right-wing populists are taking this term and elevating it to some kind of throne and filling it with this identitarian nonsense, while in our left-wing bubble the term is no longer even used, is reason enough to give it some thought. It’s also not good if you don’t think about it at all. I think that what “Heimat” means to you is something very, very individual, almost intimate. I think it’s extremely invasive to want to somehow impose this on people, to want to tell people what their own home can or cannot be, or what the term means in detail. It’s also absolutely unhealthy! Anyone can come to the conclusion “My Heimat is the Milky Way!” and the next person says that their Heimat is the village or a certain house entrance in some neighborhood. Everyone can narrow that down for themselves. That’s the main idea and it’s also what an album title has to be able to do, that it immediately touches people emotionally on a very specific level. Everyone who hears the term, even if they have a negative defensive attitude towards it, has a relationship to it. It’s great that an album title can do that!
SV: You’ve already started to fill this out in terms of content, but to what extent is Heimat different from your other albums?
Maik: Sure, albums are different, but that’s for other people to decide in retrospect where the big differences are. I think one of our great strengths is that we have found our sound and that every HEAVEN SHALL BURN fan knows after ten seconds when they hear the first track on the record that we are at the start. In this respect, every record is a continuous development of the record before it. For us, progress doesn’t happen as a revolution, where we do something completely different with a new line-up or a new producer and completely amaze people. For us, it’s a calculable further development, where progress always takes place in addition to what has to be done anyway. I therefore think that in terms of sound and songwriting, the difference to the other albums is not that big, at least from my point of view. Of course, the record is a bit more compact than the double album that came before it. There was a lot more experimentation there. If you have twenty songs on the record, then of course it gets more out of hand than if you only have ten. In this respect, the compactness of the record is perhaps the difference. We’ve improved the sound a bit, which has also been noted in reviews and I’m pleased about that! But apart from that, it’s HEAVEN SHALL BURN!
SV: What are your personal highlights on the album?
Maik: I think Sven Helbig’s compositional work is once again absolutely fantastic and successful. The string quartets that he arranged and that we recorded together in a small pilgrimage church in Thuringia (and it was as romantic as you might imagine) was simply a fantastic experience. Working with such a talented composer leaves you feeling quite inspired. In comparison, we’re just rank amateurs! He’s just written a huge requiem that he’s touring the world with and that’s a level of musical craftsmanship that’s incredibly fascinating if you can get a taste of it. On the other hand, the song A Whisper from Above means a lot to me because it tells the story of an incredibly courageous woman: Irene Gut was a Polish nurse whose life story anyone can google and understand. The song meant a lot to me!
SV: From Irene Gut’s resilience to a different kind of resilience: you mentioned briefly at the beginning that your singer unfortunately has to take a break again and that Britta is supporting you here. What does it mean to you that you have received such support from the scene in this situation?
Maik: That was really crazy! You have to imagine that we were at the biggest festival we’ve played this season, Rock am Ring, and then you’re standing there after the first song and nothing works. Not only is nothing working for the band, but one of your best friends is standing there and has done something to himself and you don’t know what’s going on. That’s a total emotional chaos on a purely personal level that you’re plunged into. It was like a movie playing in front of you. Nevertheless, there was also this positive wave of compassion and solidarity that washed over us. You can’t even say you were happy about it, it was just overwhelming! You’re standing there, you’re overwhelmed and you still have the feeling that every single one of the hundreds of thousands of people would just love to give you a hug. It was just a really amazing experience! It really left us speechless. We still don’t really know how to categorize it. I wouldn’t wish something like that on anyone, that such a wave of solidarity would become necessary, because that always means that something bad has happened, but it’s really incredible!
SV: I think you can add that to your own album of memories, that you get so much support from people who don’t know you. That’s something incredibly precious! The topic of “support” isn’t a bad idea at this point either: you’ll also be on tour. What do you wish for for the tour?
Maik: I definitely hope that we are all healthy. That’s always the first thing you wish for on a tour. As a band, you definitely want as many people as possible to come. Of course, people should also be happy about the bands we choose to support! I can’t say too much about that at the moment, but we’ve put together a great line-up. [Editor’s Note: HEAVEN SHALL BURN will be supported by THE HALO EFFECT, THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER und FROZEN SOUL]
SV: Our friends from DELIVER THE GALAXY would also be up for it! If you ever have a breakdown, please think of the guys! [We laugh]
Maik: We also had a contest at our release shows where bands could apply and it was unbelievable how many great bands applied! It feels totally stupid that you’re now sitting there and deciding which band is good and which isn’t. It’s actually totally stupid. That’s actually total nonsense! A band can be good, even if I don’t think they’re great. My, or our, taste is not the deciding factor. It was great to see how many bands applied and how many young bands are out there who really want to make music. You increasingly get the impression that everyone is just doing it for themselves on the edge of their bed for some YouTube video to become famous. The fact that young people get together in a smelly rehearsal room, have the time of their lives and simply form a band because it’s fun, that’s simply been lost in online culture! To see that it still exists was a very cool feeling!
SV: What do you wish for the future of HEAVEN SHALL BURN?
Maik: Mhm… I don’t really know how to describe it… I wish that this positive strand in the Metal scene that we’ve been following our whole career will continue. Even the shit that happened with our singer has turned into something positive. We had the opportunity to work with someone like Britta. We already knew her, of course, but getting to know her better and integrating her into the band as a friend because she’s just an incredibly great person was an incredibly happy situation! And that despite the fact that there was actually just a lot of shit at the beginning! This has happened very often in our career, that things that were actually negative, for example tours that we couldn’t go on, always turned out to be positive in the end. I would therefore like us to carry this lucky child image with us forever! Then nothing can go wrong!
SV: If you had a final message for your fans, what would it be?
Maik: I would like them to listen to the new record as an album. We want to take people on a journey with this album and we want our fans to enjoy it. They should listen to it, form an opinion about it and not just listen to the album by listening to two or three songs in a playlist, because that always does the musicians a lot of injustice. So much work goes into an album to take people on a rollercoaster ride of emotions and that often gets lost.
After this wonderful interview, you can of course expect a lot more from Rockharz 2025! You can look forward to a total of three more daily reports and six additional interviews with artists who couldn’t be more different. So stay tuned! The tickets to the upcoming HEAVEN SHALL BURN tour are available tomorrow via the band’s online shop via the general sale starting Monday!
Shieldmaiden's Voice 