Defecto Examines The 'Duality' In Our Lives: Niklas Sonne On Bringing Humor & Heaviness To Metal

Coming up on October 23rd, trend-breaking Danish Metal band Defecto have a new album landing with Duality. They've released two rather priceless videos for their singles "Rise" and "All For You", and they are guaranteed to make you laugh as well as introduce you to the melodic accessibility of Defecto's music.

Their third album arrives after some very powerful touring from the band, supporting acts like Rammstein and Metallica. With a strong sense of identity based on not taking themselves too seriously, Defecto is ready to make some big musical statements.

Songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist Niklas Sonne spoke with Tower's PULSE! about how Duality fits in with the band's previous albums and why they push the boundaries on what is expected from their musical scene.

Hannah Means-Shannon: I’ve seen online that Defecto seems to like vinyl.

Nicklas Sonne: Vinyl is coming out again and we see that people want to buy them, even more than CDs sometimes. We try to stay up with the times. We did something similar with Nemesis, a limited edition that came out as 500, and then the standard edition. We’re trying to do the same with Duality. It worked pretty well last time.

HMS: Does that affect how many songs you write for an album, knowing you’ll try to issue the album, on vinyl? If you aren’t careful, you’d have to go to double.

NS: Exactly, yes. I think we are three minutes over what is recommended for Duality. We think it works. The second album didn’t sound great on vinyl, so we did it better this time. I Produce the albums, and I didn’t know much about vinyl for the last album. So I just sent the same master as for the CD, which was so fucking loud.

HMS: Oh no!

NS: Why didn’t anyone tell me? Why didn’t the pressers tell me? Anyway, I learned my lesson.

HMS: You are not alone. I’ve heard of people making that mistake. Also, people who are reissuing albums from the 90s onward that were never released on vinyl are finding their masters aren’t workable for vinyl, or they don’t know, release it, and regret it.

NS: It sucks! People are asking me, “Why does that sound so distorted?”

HMS: You should say, “You’re not listening loud enough! Turn it up!”

NS: Yes, “Just turn it up louder!” [Laughs]

HMS: The cover art for Duality is quite different from the art on your other albums, though all of them are quite striking images. It seems like you have a very specific ideas of what you want on album covers. Are these new pieces or did you find them?

NS: For Excluded, the first one, I found the image on ShutterStock. I wrote to the artist because the image was so appealing for the subject matter. A lot of times the lyrics are based on me, and there was this little boy with the shadow, sitting there. It was perfect. For the second album, we had more ideas but nothing specific.

We tried to narrow it down to something simple and sent it to an artist, and it was made based on our descriptions. For this one, we didn’t have any ideas at all, actually, but we knew we wanted it to be more artistic, in a way, and not be too specific because the other ones were specific. We wanted something different. We wanted the sense of duality, the Yin and the Yang, in the artwork. This is more of a piece of art.

HMS: It’s very cool.

NS: We went through a lot of art and spent a lot of money on things that didn’t work. We were looking for something that had the right feel, and in the end we’re very happy with it.

HMS: I think it’s great that it’s not necessarily what you would expect from a Metal cover, but when you look at it, it is heavy. You start to wonder about these figures, and it makes you think. I like the color combination, too. I’ve heard you say online that you want to challenge some expectations of the genre in your work, too.

NS: We definitely want to create something original and we try to do that the best that we can. We try to bind together everything we like. Everything is taken from our musical hearts, so to speak. We don’t listen to what people expect of us or what the business expects of us. We try to take what we really like to do and put it down.

Some of the songs are glued together well, but at the beginning, they are a mess. Because they are one big pile of music and then we sort it out, putting it together the best we can. It still has to be an accessible song with a melody, but we want it to have this progressive element with some synths and symphonic elements. We like to us those in all our songs. It’s turning into something a bit original, I think.

HMS: That’s admirable. People are often careful to me marketable, and that’s understandable. It’s hard.

NS: It’s very hard. We’ve had that talk many times in the band. It’s no secret that we want to be big fucking Rock stars.

HMS: [Laughs] I know! I’ve seen your videos. They’re great.

NS: That’s the real us. We want to live by playing music and it’s very difficult to get there. If you do something that’s not very accessible, it’s harder, but I think we end up in a place where the music is accessible for everyone, even though it’s experimental and progressive at times.

HMS: What are some developments and differences between this album and the previous one for you?

NS: It’s funny because on this one, we didn’t have any songs already. On Nemesis, we had something like twenty songs written beforehand. On Duality, we started from scratch and I think it was really healthy because we have all evolved musically. That meant that we were more mature with our writing on this album and we had similar ideas for each song.

We weren’t trying to polish anything old and make it new. It’s all from “now”. A lot of the songs on Nemesis all come from a place where I wrote a lot of music, with a sound that’s quite dark, and they have symphonic elements and classical elements. It could be quite over the top. With this album, that’s not what we want right now. We are trying to take things out rather than putting things in. We could write with that in mind. That was the main difference.

HMS: Do you think that because they were all written together, that created a greater commonality in sound and in ideas?

NS: I think so. You can hear that the songs are all quite different, but they are still written with the same mindset. I definitely think that’s a good thing. We are trying to do the same thing with the next album. We are talking about taking several months out of the calendar, me and Frederik [Moller], who also writes the music with me, just to write music and do only that. It worked for us on Duality and we think it is a good idea.

HMS: What’s your songwriting process usually like with Frederik? You have a studio of your own right?

NS: Yes, it’s nice. I love it. It’s nice to have a place you can withdraw. I write music by myself, and Frederick writes music by himself. We’ve tried writing together, but it doesn’t work out. For me, when I hear some new music that I want to write, I have all these arrangements in my mind. I can hear everything. I can see what I’m playing on the guitar and I can hear the violins and the weird synths, and the beat, and everything.

If I have to explain all that to Frederick, for example, I need to create it and record it before I can show it to him. If I had to share it with him, it would take about an hour, and then he would say, “I would have done it differently.”

It would be a long process. It’s easier to create the songs independently, then show them to each other, then work on them together afterwards. But all four of us actually listen to each other’s ideas for songs and if Mikkel [Christensen], the drummer, has an alternate drum pattern, we change that on the spot. If Thomas [Bartholin], the bass player, has an idea, he’s free to record that in the studio.

HMS: When did you record your recent videos, like “All For You” and “Rise”?

NS: We recorded “All For You” in January, so the Corona virus wasn’t out there. We recorded “Rise” a week before we released it.

HMS: You’re ruining my theories because both of those videos seem like pandemic-shot videos that are being very clever. They are both perfect for only having small groups of people involved. For “Rise”, you’re in cars, and you have empty roads for the driving part. For “All For You”, I thought that breaking into an empty music store wouldn’t be too hard right now. I’m totally wrong, but it’s weird how perfectly those fit!

NS: That’s true, actually. We were meant to release the album earlier, but due to the pandemic, it got postponed. We hadn’t decided which songs to release and had lots of discussion. Those were the videos we hadn’t shot yet, so we were in a hurry. We’ve had this theme ever since the first album. On the first album, there’s this video where I’m sitting with my girlfriend having dinner and she asks, “How’s it going with the CD?” I take out my guitar and the whole band crashes the living room as we eat, and she hates it, obviously, because she was just asking to be friendly. Haha!

HMS: I love it. That’s great. You have a sense of humor in all these videos. I wanted to ask you about that, because I think that more bands take them seriously than those that don’t. Is that part of your live performance as well as your videos? Are you funny on stage?

NS: Always. We don’t take ourselves very seriously, but we still do. We’ve always wanted to have fun with it. There was a show where I put on a blow-up dinosaur costume for the final song. It was ridiculous. We do stuff that we think is funny because we want to entertain people and we want to entertain ourselves.

This dates back to the beginning of our career, because we made a video explaining what Defecto was about for a contest. How do you explain our music in one minute? We decided to separate it into different styles. We had Rap on the beach where we dressed up like true gangsters. It was a ridiculous song. The next clip has us with symphonic instruments and ties, and then last, we’re in the woods playing Death Metal. We’ve always tried to have fun.

I personally feel like it can make you cringe when you see a band who is really taking themselves seriously. It can just be too much.

HMS: Defecto doesn’t seem to do concept albums, but you do tend toward themes. Is this one even more thematic, or less so?

NS: The first album definitely had more of a direct narrative than Duality has. With Duality, we have a subject we wanted to write about, but it’s not very specific. It’s about opposite feelings. There is a song about heartbreak. I never thought I would write about heartbreak, but it’s there.

HMS: It doesn’t get much more universal than that.

NS: That’s definitely something that I was thinking about when I wrote it. I thought I might as well go all in. With Duality, when you listen to the album, you can see that some have a soft side and some have a complex side, and that’s a duality as well.

HMS: That’s great that the theme extends even to sound. The idea of duality reminds me of the primeval gods like the Titans. It could be an ancient god. What brought the idea to you?

NS: It’s an extension of the other albums. The first two albums are about me, selfishly. They are about my feelings and experiences, though you can interpret them in different ways because they are not very direct. But this duality thing is a feeling that I’ve been dealing with a great deal of my life. You’ll find some duality on the other albums, thinking about the dark side and the bright side, the negative moments of your life and the positive moments.

Nemesis is about those feelings, and going forward from there, it made sense to do something similar. These are things I can write about because they’ve been a big part of my life. “Duality” is a strong word and a strong feeling. It’s very relatable.

HMS: It is. You can always find parallels, but right now, there’s a very divided sense in the world, with a lot of opposition and conflict. It’s even more polarized than in recent history.

Maybe having a sense of humor will help people.

NS: Yes, I totally agree. There’s a horrible thing in Denmark, a rule, that you should not express if you’re good at something. It’s the opposite of Americans. I love coming to America where people talk to you if you’re standing at a bus stop. In Denmark, no one talks to you. You’re by yourself. And especially in the music business, if you think you are good at something, you are considered an asshole.

HMS: Like you’re showing off?

NS: Yes, you’re considered a show-off. You’re not allowed to be better than anyone else. And we hate that, so we’re just doing everything we can to show that we don’t care about that. Some people hate us for it, but even more people love us for it. All the people who are not in the music business love it, they see a band coming in strong. So it works in that sense, but the other musicians don’t like it because they don’t dare to do it. It’s very weird and hard to explain because it’s so stupid.

HMS: I’ve lived in cultures that are more reserved and rules-based, so I can understand, but at the same time I can see how that would make being in a band very difficult. Any kind of Rock music is about being loud and seen, really.

NS: Right? It’s weird.

HMS: They must particularly hate your video for “Rise”, then, which is like “California meets Denmark”.

NS: Exactly!

HMS: That’s the real duality! Between the two lives, the one where you have to be so quiet and reserved, and then the one with the band.

NS: Yes, that’s true.

HMS: There’s a great photo you put up of the band outside, wearing sunglasses, in front of some graffiti. That’s a statement of identity. I guess that will get you some hate mail for that. For me, it that picture didn’t seem unusual at all. For me, it said, “These guys are having fun.”, which is infectious.

HMS: Do you have any preferences about how audiences should listen to the album?

NS: I think the best way to listen to the album is from start to finish, because we’ve put a lot of thought into what song comes where on the album. The best listening experience will be our track list. There are a couple of the songs are tied together with a fluid transition, too.

HMS: Our motto at Tower Records is “No Music, No Life”, also written as “Know Music, Know Life”. Which do you prefer and how does it apply to your life?

NS: I think that I would definitely know less about myself if I didn’t know music. If I didn’t know how to write music, if I couldn’t listen to music, I wouldn’t be able to know as much about myself. I’ve evolved out of music and out of being creative with music. I’ve always expressed my feelings to myself through music. It’s like I’m creating an arrangement of emotions, and when I’ve created this, it’s like I can put it in a drawer, and close the drawer, but the emotion is still there. Without knowing music, I wouldn’t know myself, I think.