Interviews About Albums: GRAVA - The Great White Nothing (2024)

In this new interview, we sat down with the Danish Sludge Metal band GRAVA to ask questions about their album, "The Great White Nothing".

1. Your debut album, Weight of a God, was praised for its raw yet disciplined approach to sludge metal. How did you approach the songwriting process for The Great White Nothing, and in what ways did you aim to expand your sound?

We didn’t try to expand our sound, really. We continued to work from the foundations of “Weight of a God” but somehow new nuances crept into the songwriting and soundscape. On top of that, this time we had 5 days in the studio instead of 3, so there was a bit more space to work with.

2. The first two tracks of the album focus on the Franklin Expedition, a historical event marked by tragedy and mystery. What inspired you to choose this event as a starting point for the album, and how did you capture its essence through your music?

I found a book about it in a used bookstore in Greenland a couple of years ago and while reading it, I actually passed the last place the Franklin Expedition was seen alive before they sailed into their doom. I came back to Copenhagen and mentioned it to the band and it turned out that Niels had read the very same book many years ago. So, for a while it became a general theme for us, and in the end we decided to let it span across the two opening songs on the album “Erebus” and “White Thresher”. The idea of being completely lost in an unforgiving wasteland of ice in a neverending night (or day, depending on the season), was interesting to us, especially since our debut album had more of a fire theme going on. Some of these themes seemed to bleed into the sound of the album as we were recording it.

3. Your songs often center around moments of death and despair, like the Swedish nobleman in "Breaker" and the soldier in "Bayonet." How do you balance historical accuracy with the emotional intensity you bring to these narratives?

This is a good question and one we still wrestle with week after week. What usually happens is that some historical event inspires us in some way, and then we create a song based on what we’ve read. But we’re not doing it as a faithful historical account, rather we try to bring some of these moments to life, so in a sense, it’s all fictionalized. You mentioned “Bayonet” and that’s exactly how that song happened: It’s about a soldier who is about to be sent to certain death in the trenches of World War I, and the inspiration came mostly from reading diaries from World War I. But we didn’t portray one specific story, we created an entirely new one that captured an atmosphere that went well with the music.

But it isn’t always that easy. When we wrote “Breaker”, we actually ended up quoting directly from the sources. That song is about a Swedish nobleman Johann Patkul who is sentenced to death for treason but is never informed about the method of his execution. So he lingers in anguish in a jail cell, and during his last days, a chaplain is sent to accompany him. This chaplain writes the entire ordeal down in an account that spans 50 or so pages and describes how Johann would keep asking about his execution but never receive any answer. So, on the day of his execution, he is brought to the town square where he sees wheels and spikes lying on the ground. He realizes that he is about to be broken on the wheel and in horror he falls to his knees crying and asks the crowd to pray with him. What follows is as horrifying as these things get and in the end, Johann crawls on broken limbs to the chopping block, pleading for his head to be removed. When we wrote the song, we felt that the only way forward was simply to quote Johann himself and more or less let the music do the rest.

4. Despite being in a genre known for long tracks, you’ve kept most of your songs around the three-minute mark. How do you manage to convey such complex themes and emotions in these shorter compositions without losing depth?

We often ask “is this part really needed for this song to work?” A question like that is an amazing intro-killer but it also helps temper a song with a lot of verses for instance. Sometimes you might be describing something over the course of several verses that might be summed up in one simple image. Half long, twice strong as the saying goes.

5. The album isn't a concept album per se, but the themes of death and tragedy are consistent throughout. Do you see these as standalone stories or as part of a larger exploration of mortality?

Well, both. We wanted to capture moments of death through the eyes of the dying which is something very intense and intimate. It is as far from a bird’s eye view as you can get. But something seems to happen when you put a string of these songs next to each other, so there is something else going on, although I’m not sure how to put it into words.

6. Troels Damgaard Holm returned to produce this album, and Brad Boatright mastered it again at Audiosiege. What was it like working with them on The Great White Nothing, and how did their expertise help shape the final product?

Troels is a very intuitive guy, and he is always trying out new ways to approach a recording. As with “Weight of a God” we really wanted to capture the feeling of a live band and Troels just asked us to set up our own gear in the middle of the studio. We recorded the whole album like that without headphones, metronome, punch-ins, or anything like that. There are overdubs as well to beef up the sound in places but the heart of the album is the raw intensity of a live performance. It is very much to Troels’ credit that this is even possible because this is definitely not as easy to do in practice as it sounds on paper. After 5 days we were utterly exhausted.

7. The combination of Faroese and Danish influences seems to have shaped GRAVA’s unique sound. How do your cultural backgrounds play into the creation of your music, especially when dealing with such universal and timeless themes as death?

Yeah, there is something there. I grew up on The Faroe Islands which has a rich musical culture that reaches back more than a thousand years. As you can imagine, living on small islands in the middle Arctic wasn’t always especially easy, and theme of death is present in a lot of the poetry and music. I’ve never tried to cram it into our music but some of the melodies and rhythm inevitably creep into my guitarplaying.

8. "Mangled" tells the story of a train accident near Copenhagen in 1897. What drew you to this particular event, and how did you translate the horror and chaos of the accident into your sonic palette?

We began writing the song without any particular theme in mind, but at some point, we felt that there was a violent, almost steel-on-steel sensation to the music, and so the idea was born. Later, I stumbled across a pamphlet about this particular train accident that happened a long time ago, but very close to home. The accident was widely reported at the time, so we had access to a lot of eyewitness accounts from journalists and survivors. What happened was that a high-speed train plunged directly into a small train as it was taking in passengers at a station on a late Sunday evening, transforming the scene from an idyllic summer night to an infernal image of mangled steel, black smoke, and screaming voices. It is very hard to convey the horror of the events that took place that night and we tried our best not to get too gory about it. Some of the scenes are actually quite moving. Just to take one example, there was one man who managed to crawl out of the carnage and in great pain stumble his way back to the train station. On the way there he met hospital workers who offered to help him, but he flatly denied any help and urged them to help others who might have a chance at surviving. He knew he was beyond saving.

9. Your use of vivid and fragmented storytelling creates a powerful atmosphere. How do you ensure that the emotional intensity of these snapshots of death resonates with listeners, while also maintaining musical cohesion?

It is a question of balance. When we stumble upon a striking image, we try not to lose our step and let it dominate the songwriting process. To put it in another way, when we get a really good idea, we might feel that we are describing something profound in that moment, but at the same time, we never forget that we are doing so in a basement playing sludge metal. If the riff isn’t making your head move a bit, there is no song and whatever image we tried to convey is lost.

10. What do you hope listeners take away from The Great White Nothing? Is there a particular emotion or experience you're aiming to evoke through the music and the stories behind it?

We tried to capture the moments as best we could through the music and lyrics, and hopefully some of the emotions and imagery flowed through the speakers on the other end.