Behind The Tracks: HUNTER - Wicked (Single) (2023)

David (Vocals): Whenever I try to explain this to people, they think I'm nuts. But in our songwriting process, usually a guitarist has a riff or two, and an idea of how the song goes. The band starts looking for structure and starts playing it. As a singer, I'm useless at this point. But as soon as it starts sounding like a song, I start listening to it. And I actually hear sounds in my head. Sometimes they are like words. Sometimes they are melodies. But I always know where I wanna sing, and what rhythm, and kind of already what it sounds like. Then I need to find words that match those sounds.

It's like artists say: the statue was always in that block of stone, I just had to get it out of there. I hear the words already, I just have to listen more carefully to what they actually are.

I think in English there are sounds that sound very smooth and cool (like the words smooth and cool) and sounds that are harsh and rough (like the words harsh and rough) and I like to play with that. The riffs immediately tell me what type of song we're making, and what sounds will sound well together. What set off the topic of this song is the chorus I had in my head before the rest came along: "It's time to rise against the wicked tralala". Because I needed the long aaaaaaa sound in time and repeat that long aaaaaaaa again in rise. Inner rhymes are your friend.

With Wicked, the first I heard was two voices. One, is the accuser. The other one, the Wicked. Originally I wanted to exaggerate that effect in my vocals. I wanted to sing the first and grunt the second. But I didn't like it. You can still hear it in the song and you can read it in the lyrics, that the first part of a verse is always the accuser, and the second part of a verse is the bad guy.

Once I build lyrics around the voices I hear in my head, I will ask to repeat parts in the song so that I have more space for my vocals or shorten something because it's too long for my lyrics, or we move stuff around. But once I have heard the words and melodies in my head, I change the structure of the song so that it makes sense with the lyrics. Thematically, this song is about that age-old question of why the wicked seem to thrive and why they seem to lead a pleasant, comfortable life. While the righteous seem to be the poor and are being taken advantage of. In the last verse, you'll hear that the wicked will eventually fall on their own swords.

What I like about Wicked, is that it's fast and it sounds very sharp. So you would think that it's about something evil, while we're declaring war against evil. I like that contrast. Heavy metal sounds aggressive to a lot of people. But if you listen to what the lyrics are about, you'll notice a lot of it is a raised fist against how things are.