TRISTANIA To Record New Album In February

Norwegian symphonic metal band TRISTANIA have posted the following message on their official web site:

"First of all we would like thank the ones that showed up and supported us on Wave Gotik Treffen, Summer Breeze and Wacken Open Air. We had a great time.

"As most of you know by now; we're currently in writing mode. Østen [Bergoy, vocals] has been writing quite some of the lyrics, and both Anders [H. Hidle, guitar] and Einar [Moen, keyboards/programming] are working busily with pre-production of the songs. Right now we are starting to jam on the new material as a complete band in the rehearsal room. We learned with 'Ashes' [2005] how fruitful this can turn out; especially considering the vocals. The whole band is shaping the material together during this process, and each member adds a personal touch to his/her lines. Usually new ideas also is born through this process, and to a certain degree we are composing music from scratch this way. This time around we also have a 'new' creative force in Svein Terje [Solvang, guitar] .

"Not doing too many gigs at the moment, as we want to focus on the song writing. One of the few concerts we will do this period is in Norway: We will play the Karmøygeddon Arctic Festival, in Haugesund on November 12th — together with TÖMMERMENN (some of us are huge fans of their music) and EVERGREY, among others.

"We were earlier hoping to do a full U.S. tour during this autumn. Although a couple of offers came up, the right offer to support a headliner that somehow fits our sound didn't come up this time. The reason for this was mainly that a possible U.S. tour would need to take place within a quite short time frame (after the summer festivals, before pre-production of the upcoming album). As U.S. is a new territory to tour for us (Metalfest, L.A. in 2000 is our only U.S. gig so far) we need to support a bigger band in order to tour the States. Of course, no one can control who is touring at a given time, but we're confident that the first proper U.S. tour will happen after the release of next year's album. We know from all the fan mail we have got during the years that a lot of people want us to come to U.S. Well, soon you will get this opportunity — we hope you'll use it!

"Everything goes really well concerning writing the new material. Einar has built a home studio in the basement of his house, and we work there almost every weekend with pre-production of the new songs — using Nuendo. Quite soon we will also have ready a recording room for vocals connected to the studio. Other than that we are e-mailing ideas back and forth to each other and it slowly the songs are developed.

We are extremely eager about the new stuff, and we feel that we have the basis for some very solid songs at the moment. In the spirit of TRISTANIA the new material is quite diverse. A couple of the tracks will include some doomy stuff, and we are working on an industrial piece. A couple of the songs can be described as dark atmospheric stuff. There will be some heavy guitar based tracks, which at least we find very catchy. In the end it is too early to tell which songs that will make it to the album, still we're confident that we will end up with an album we will be proud of.

"Concerning producer and choice of studio, this decision has already been made. We will wait a little bit with publishing these details, because we first want everything to be 100% confirmed. We will come together with the producer in December, and work on the songs together. If it works out like we think it will do, we will go for this choice — and we will record the album in February, with a planned release before the summer. After the release we will be ready for heavy touring again.

"Looking forward to see you guys again then!"