German metalcore unit Caliban put out the new album Back From Hell on April 25th. Metal Covenant met guitarist Marc Görtz and bassist Iain Duncan before the band performed in Stockholm, Sweden on May 4th.

Tell me about the new record Back From Hell, which was just out.

Marc: Yeah, we’re very proud of the record. It’s three years in the making, and for me at least, it had to be, like, a groundbreaking record, because I was very unhappy with the previous one, Dystopia, and I wanted to change a lot. I don’t know how to say that, but I didn’t wanna do compromises somehow, because I did too many compromises, in my opinion, on the previous album. That album died for me very quickly after the release, you know. So this is a very important album for me, and we wanted it very heavy, very straightforward, and not too playful, and stuff like that. So yeah, that’s something I can say about the album.

Iain: Yeah, I can tune in there, absolutely. The goal was quite clear from the beginning. It was, “Let’s be straightforward. Let’s not take the listener on crazy journeys. This has got to be the most straightforward thing we can possibly do. Serve the song, serve the record.”. It came together very naturally though, because that was the outline goals. We made logical decisions throughout the whole album process. I think this will be an album that we’ll be able to listen to in a long time, and that won’t lose its relevance for us as artists, you know. So it’s something we’re all very proud of.

And can any of you guys tell me something about the lyrical content on the album?

Iain: Yeah, well, I suppose we all can. Back From Hell itself, coming from the title first of all: I think everybody in the band has a similar vibe about how the evolution of the band has waves, ‘cause there’s ups and downs, and there was kind of a down phase before this album came together. There were a lot of personal issues that were in all of our lives, various different things, a lot of stuff in private life. There were suicides, breakups, deaths in families, and many different things that made life feel like a pretty dark place when we got together and started. I can’t remember. What was it, Marc? You told the story before about when the album was meant to be called Back From Hell, but it was really early in the process.

Marc: Yeah, it was very early. When the first one or two songs were written. We were writing on this material. It was pretty rough and edgy, and stuff like that. I think Matthi, from the band Nasty, was one of the vocal coaches for Andy at that point. He came up with the idea because it’s a part of the lyrics in that song. That was the first or the second song which was written; not fully produced. But then he said like, “Isn’t that matching perfectly? Because you with your band were going through bad times.”. We didn’t know if we wanted to continue or not. We had, like Iain said, issues. We were not happy, and stuff like that. And then we sat down and said, “You know what? Now we go full force.”. Instead of the opposite, and not put our heads in the sand or something.”. Then he said, “Isn’t that a good title, Back From Hell? Because it matches all kinds of things, lyrics-wise up to that point, musically, what you wanna do, personal issues, and what you wanna achieve with this album.”, and, “Oh yeah. That’s actually perfect.”. I remember that I was saying that to the band right before we were about to hit the stage. I think it was at Summer Breeze Festival, so it was very long ago, almost three years, and we had, like, five or ten minutes time, and then I got a message from Matthi, and I said, “Hey. What do you guys think about that title?”, and they were like, “Well. Let it grow on us.”, and a day or two later we settled for that, and it didn’t change anymore.

Iain: That was cool, because knowing that the outlines were so clear, and knowing where we were going with this, “Back From Hell”, we started writing different lyrics, different materials, and had this big pool of content, of stuff. I sat down a lot with Andy for conversations, just like, “What are we feeling? What do we actually wanna be singing about here?”. ‘Cause I got some baggage, and he was like, “So do I.”. And we kind of put our baggage in a trolley. You know, there’s songs like Insomnia, which are literally from a place of not being able to sleep for months on end because things are going on. Songs like Overdrive, that deal with this whole headspace of not being able to stop obsessing over something that’s not important anymore, but keeps bothering you. Till Death Do Us Part, also one of these songs. You know, “My heart is burning, and my rage takes me higher. Feels like I’m walking on fire.”. Everything deals with a great plethora of emotions that you’re kind of stuck with. So it’s a real release to be able to put these things into songs, and to be able to tell the story like I am now. So that’s exactly what it’s about, you know. So yeah, there we are now with the record, where I could probably write you an essay on every single song, because that’s just what it is. You know, there’s no sugarcoating anything.

I was thinking about the length of the songs. The longest song isn’t even four minutes long on this album. How come you’re not writing a little bit longer songs, and prefer to stay within four minutes and shorter?

Marc: Like I said before, we wanted to get straight to the point, and leave out somehow unnecessary things. We are not this kind of band with a tradition of opuses, of huge songs, and huge build-ups. That’s not who we are, that’s not what we do. We wanna get straight to the point. We have this kind of energy in the songs. Some songs could have been a bit longer, but then on the other hand, “Why?”. I’m not gonna say who said this, but we had this discussion also, some of us, because of traditional ways, or if we should do it longer or not, and then someone said, “If they like the song so much, they can listen to it again.”. Why have four choruses in a song, instead of two or three, to just make it longer with parts which have been there before one, two or three times, you know? It’s essential, we wanted to cut the bullshit, get straight to the point, and don’t bore the listeners, and stuff. Of course some songs are quite short. I agree with that. But yeah, I think it felt somehow natural to do that, and the energy of the songs is this way also higher. This is why we actually put one or two extra songs on the album. I think most bands these days put, like, 10 songs on the album, maximum, or maybe 11, so we thought, “Let’s at least give the listeners the value in a way of more songs.”. Instead of 10 songs, which are all four minutes long, we just do 12 or 13. They have the same value, but more variation.

You have a couple of guest artists on the album. Tell me a little about those appearances.

Marc: Well, we’ve known some of them for quite a long time. For example, I and Joe (Bad) from Fit For An Autopsy have been friends for quite a long time. And we always said in the past that we at some point would do something together. Until now it wasn’t really working, and then I met him when they played, I think, the Impericon Festival in Germany or something. We were talking already, and then we said, “All right. Let’s do something together.”, and then this song (Dear Suffering) matched perfectly. Jonny (McBee) from The Browning was more a spontaneous thing. We were thinking that this song (Back From Hell) needed some extra special kind of thing, and then we were thinking about it, and they are at the same management company, you know. I know Jonny also from a long time ago. He’s also streaming on Twitch, and I do that too. We watched each other’s stuff, and we were chatting a little bit, so we had a little bit of background somehow, and then we were asking, and he actually sent the tracks, like, two hours later. Around noon we talked to him, sent him the files at one, and at four I had them in my mixing session.

Iain: I think, like, with these feature guests in general, what you always wanna do is you wanna try and elevate the song. It was the same with Guilt Trip, with Lukas (Nicolai). Nahuel (Lozano), who plays guitar for Mental Cruelty, was also involved in various parts of writing this Back From Hell album, because he’s a bro, and they speak a lot, and do a lot of stuff.

Marc: Yeah, we were producing together, and he added some stuff to that song.

Iain: We keep joking about this goblin vocal, which is this whole (Makes various noise.) thing, and then it just so happened of course. He plays for a band called Mental Cruelty, and they’ve got this vocalist that can do this. So on a day in December when Lukas was on tour with Cradle Of Filth, they went around to the venue and recorded his vocals downstairs in the bus. And, you know, that’s actually a really funny story. Took an hour, and, “Here’s the stuff.”, right? Mixing session, same evening, done, you know? You can, of course, as a band always do your thing, but I think for Caliban it’s always been cool to just get a different sound of voice and pitch and color involved, and I think it suits the album perfectly. I’m really happy we did it.

And nowadays, when you don’t hire a studio for millions, of whatever currency, in which places do you record stuff? Home studios?

Marc: Yeah. I mean, I’m moving soon to an official studio. The room which I use as a studio is in my apartment, but soon not anymore. But yeah, we did it this way, and I also do other bands there, you know. Our recording, mixing process, and producing flow so much together. It’s not like you can finish writing, and then say, “Now we book a studio to record.”, because it all flows together, and it would cost hundreds or thousands if you would write down every day we are recording, mixing, and writing. So we did the vocals in a different studio, in Cologne, with a friend of ours. I took the tracks with me, and the rest we recorded in my studio.

Iain: There were a few things that were, like, changed around. So a demo would come from Marc, and then we’d bring it into the vocals booth, and end up chopping things around, making suggestions. I live in Berlin, right, so I’ve got my home studio, so I’ll throw down an idea there, “What do you think of that?”. We’re sending things back and forward. It’s all very digital, of course, these days, but at the end of the day the result speaks for itself, I feel. It’s all about good file management, you know. I mean, if I were in Marc’s position, I would go absolutely fucking crazy.

Marc: Next time we don’t use Google Drive. I have to make a statement here. I’m not using Google Drive anymore.

Iain: Yeah, Google Drive is fucking shit. Fuck Google Drive, man. It just fucks up your system. You know, if you’ve got your own account, or sharing accounts.

Marc: I just saw, like, a post from Christoph (Wieczorek) from Annisokay. He was also recording. He said to all bands, “Don’t send me your shit in Google Drive anymore.”. (Laughs) It was like an Instagram story. But yeah, we were sharing files, and then I had to somehow organize it again, because we had been working with different producers, and not just with one or something, you know. We co-produced many things, so I had files from all over the place, and put them in the system, and record them again, and make everything. It was very, very chaotic in a way. It worked out, but it was very annoying. But yeah, the mixing thing, and stuff like that, we do ourselves. I mean, the mastering I give out to a friend (Olman V. Wiebe) who’s, like, mastering all my mixes I do. You know, for all kinds of bands, and he’s always doing that. So this is how we do it, yeah.

And what’s it like for you personally, Iain, to come in and record songs for an album when it’s the band’s 13th full-length album?

Iain: There’s a lot of history to respect. It’s a walk on thin ice, first of all, and you kind of need to claim your space. Not that I was trying to take any space away from anybody else, but you as an artist wanna put your footprint on something. I think, in the midst of it, it was always very exciting to try to bring everything up to a new level, and just try to improve everything. I didn’t have to say about the old stuff, “This isn’t good, that’s not good.”. It’s not about that. It’s about how can we put all these things that happened, that Caliban has created over the years, into one album without destroying what these things are, and kind of referencing the old material, and give it a new polish, and throw it together? So it was a challenge, but it was also an opportunity for me as a vocalist, obviously, because I’ve never recorded that many songs on an album in my life. I’ve never sang so much in the studio ever, you know. But it all came very naturally at the same time, so for me personally it’s a perfect match. So, happy about that one.

As I said, the 13th album, Marc. Could you ever imagine such a number when you started out 27 years ago with the first EP?

Marc: No, not really, no. It was like a fun-project in the beginning. It’s actually a school band, to be honest. I and Andy, and in the past other students from that school, formed a band, and later it outgrew the school kind of thing, and then members changed, and yeah, we never thought about doing even two or three albums. We just lived for the moment somehow. And actually, I still don’t think about these kinds of numbers. For many people, even for my wife, it’s not understandable that I’m not nostalgic somehow. I don’t cling to things. I don’t even have all our CDs. I just don’t. Because I have recorded them, they’re out there, I can listen to them, but I don’t need to have them. I know for many people it’s hard to understand. I don’t have that. I don’t have this kind of feeling. So that’s also the reason that I don’t think about, “Oh damn. 13 albums.”. I just make music as long as I like it, and if it’s 5, 15, 50 albums… This is not really occupying my mind somehow. It’s hard to understand; I get that, but I’m a little weird when it comes to that. But as you see, the last albums took a little bit longer to write and to make, because we didn’t wanna take any chances or something, you know. It was a bit more focused. And sometimes we have, like, turning point albums in our career. We did, like, two or three of those, and they always took a bit longer. You know, like three years, or three and a half, or something. I know many people hate me when I say that, but for example, albums like The Undying Darkness, I could release one of them each year. It’s to me very easy. It was very easy to write, and it came out very easy. Like, I think it came out a year and two months after The Opposite From Within. (Editor’s note: It was 17 months between the release dates.) And this came somehow naturally. But if I sit down and think, “We have to change something. I want to be more creative. Not just do what we usually do.”, then it takes longer, and that’s why this album, and also I Am Nemesis took longer.

You were mentioning Caliban being a school band. Do you remember how you got into playing metalcore in the beginning?

Marc: I was a metalhead in school. I was pretty much an outsider. Pretty much like everyone else in this band was somehow, because metal at that time wasn’t really popular, at least not in my hometown and in my school. So we got laughed at because we were wearing Morbid Angel t-shirts and stuff like that. Any shit like that, you know. And in the very beginning we mostly just covered songs. We had, like, two or three songs, and the rest were Metallica, Machine Head, later on some very early Korn stuff. That is how we started, and then there came along this kind of school contest where we had this newcomer contest where only people from schools could participate, and we were like, “We might not be as good as the others, but we are louder than the others.”. And the whole audience was shocked, you know. Because the rest were, like, pop and grungy. You know, the heaviest other band sounded like Nirvana. That was the second heaviest band, you know. Of course it wasn’t as heavy as it is nowadays, but it was in the vein of, let’s say, older Metallica, but just not as technical, and not as fast maybe, but a bit more screamy. We actually won the audience prize. Not the jury prize. Yeah, they were completely shocked. But we won one of the two prizes, and then we continued from there. And we actually went back 10 or 12 or 13 years later. We got contacted by our old school, if we could play kind of a comeback show, like, “The big band touring the world coming from our school. Can you play here?”. So what we did was we played again on the newcomer fest, but as special guests. It was like the school kids did their thing, the newcomers, and while the jury was, like, judging the songs, we played. So in the break of an hour. I don’t wanna get into it; it was very chaotic. Because the show was just five or six or seven Euros, and we had like a really big following in this area at that time, especially, and it was overly, overly, overly, overly sold out. They didn’t expect it because this festival is never sold out. Because it’s in the school auditorium, and usually its capacity is about 800. They made some pre-sales, but usually they don’t really do much, because it’s, like, the parents, the school kids, and then 500 people or something. Yeah, and they didn’t check the pre-sales, and it was 1400, and that doesn’t even include the parents and the school kids, you know. It was very wild. The show was really chaotic, because our fans came there, and then when we finally played the place was packed to the roof. There was no security, because they didn’t know, and then there was stage diving, a wall of death, circle pits, and stuff like that. And the teachers were like, “Oh, my God. What did we get into?”. We got banned from the school. But it was funny somehow.

And how did you get into this heavy music in the first place, Iain?

Iain: By listening to Caliban. (Laughs) No, not really. I started when I was 13 or so. I’ve been playing guitar and piano for as long as I can remember. Mostly piano. But the most notable thing happened when I was, like, 13. Somebody gave me an Ozzy Osbourne CD. It was a bootleg, and it was Ozzy Osbourne stuff, and it was like, “Okay. Heavy metal, that’s my thing.”. Started playing with a band, then came Slipknot, then came Korn, nu-metal. Fast forward, three years later metalcore happened, Caliban, Killswitch (Engage), Heaven Shall Burn, God Forbid, Himsa, The Sorrow, Do Or Die. And that happened really quickly. Like, metalcore was everything and everywhere, and it felt like the scene I was in was really big, and every band I’d play with would be metalcore, clearly. Started with one band, then the other one, then the next, then the next, and now I’m here today. You know, I’ve always played metalcore, and it’s the genre that I feel at home in. That’s where I function, you know. Without getting too theoretical about it, if another metalcore band asked me to join, it would be the easiest thing to learn, because it’s just the genre that I’m at home with. Compared to if someone said, “Hi. Do you wanna join a death metal band?”, then I’d be like (Breathes out). Technically, yeah. I’d have to sit down and practice for nine months beforehand and probably move to Finland to get the vibe or something. But now it feels right at home. It’s right where I sit. So a perfect sweet spot for me.

You guys both mentioned some early influences. Iain mentioned Ozzy, and Marc mentioned Morbid Angel. Those guys have long hair, so how come your generation does not have long hair, but is still playing heavy music?

Iain: Some people’s hair if it’s long doesn’t look good at some point. Let’s just put that out there. (Laughs)

Marc: I, Andy, and the rest of the members at the beginning, were very quickly transitioning from this traditional metal. When the band actually was becoming more serious, we were in this new-school hardcore. You know, not metal. We were not playing metal shows. We didn’t play with other real metal bands, especially in the old days. That was really like, you know, “Metal hates hardcore.”, and the other way around, and stuff like that. I don’t know if you’re familiar with bands like Earth Crisis and Snapcase, but those were the bands we were playing with and looking up to. All these kinds of bands which had a little bit of metal in their music. So this is actually where we are coming from, you know. So it was a bit of a different scene. Even though I still listen to metal stuff, like straight up metal stuff, I was more influenced by these kinds of things, you know. That’s probably why we didn’t have that kind of hair. But I mean, actually when I was 12 to 16, and I was going to death metal shows, I had long hair. Like, somehow long hair, you know. My very first concert was Asphyx, Benediction, Bolt Thrower, in Essen, when I wasn’t even living in Essen. I was telling my mom, “I’ll sleep at a friend’s house.”, and the friend said the same thing. We actually took the train to Essen. It’s like half an hour on a train, and then after the show I remember there was no train, and we walked home, like, for four hours in the middle of the night. If our parents would have known that, like, 12 or 13-year-olds walked, like, four and a half hours in the middle of the night back to the home city, they would probably have been pretty mad. But yeah, at that time, I, and also my friend, had long hair, at least to the shoulders.

Iain: I keep thinking, “Should I do it once more in life?”. But I don’t know. I’m just not a long hair guy. It makes me look like someone from Hanson or something. I can’t get it to sit right, so it doesn’t suit me.

Marc: I would say it’s a hassle. If I see my wife always dealing with her hair, and what she needs to do, and whatnot, and then, “I can’t go out. My hair isn’t dry, and it takes another hour.”, and I say, “Oh, fuck that.”.

I took a peek at your setlist from the other day, and looked up what songs you’re playing on this tour. From the new album, including the intro Resurgence, there were six songs on that list, and those were the first six songs, and none of the last seven songs on the album. Does that mean that the first half of the new album is much better than the second half?

Marc: That’s straight up a coincidence. We all have different opinions on which are the best songs. For example, my favorite song is even number 10 or something, you know. It just happened to be that we chose those songs because those were the ones which got released up front as singles. The album dropped right at the tour start, and we didn’t want the songs for half of the set to be completely unknown to people. I mean, one of them, Insomnia, is new to people, but all the others were singles. So we wanted people to have something to listen to upfront, and not that half of the setlist is completely new to them, you know. That it got to the point in this kind of order is really a coincidence, because the second single, Echoes, is the last track on the album, because it has this kind of ending. It was a good ending track. And the intro is written towards the opening track, Guilt Trip. It was just fitting somehow. It’s a real coincidence.

Another question about the setlist. You’re not playing any songs from the first three albums or the early EPs. Are these albums not the same to you anymore? The Beloved And The Hatred from The Opposite From Within is the oldest song in the set.

Marc: Even with this one, The Beloved And The Hatred, it gets tough, because our audience is not as old, I think. If you choose the album from ’97, that is so long ago that most of the people on our shows weren’t even born. If you find that sad or something, I don’t know. But many years ago we did a medley of very, very old tracks, and the people were staring at us and, “What is that stuff?”. I mean, of course, if you go through the history of the band, from album to album, you see the progress, and you can see it’s the same band. But if you jump from the first album to the last, it sounds of course like a completely different band, you know. So the band was very different on the first couple of albums. Especially, if you get to know us with the last four or five albums, and then you listen to the very first, it’s like, “What is that?”. We had that, we tried that, and it was real, because there are so many people that scream for that old-school stuff, and then from a thousand people like 20 were going nuts and 980 were like, “Huh? What is that?”. We might do, we might do… This is maybe a little spoiler. We got an offer from some friends of mine from the past. They always do kind of like old-school revival shows in my hometown, and they always get bands which have been existing for a very, very long time to play an old-school set. A straight up old-school set. You don’t play any new stuff, you know. It’s like you play 10 songs from the first albums. And this is quite successful, but the audience is also very different. The promotion is very different, because it goes to some message boards where, like, the old-school fans are, and stuff like that. I can see us doing that, because I know that people who come there just come specifically for that. It’s not that many. It’s a smaller show, like 500 or something, which for our home area is kind of small. So these people will be into it, you know. But if you would just randomly play the song Assassin Of Love live now, it’s like, “What?”. People will not understand that, I think.

Iain: What we’ve realized now with the way our show is set up right now is that The Beloved And The Hatred is absolutely the furthest possible that we can go back right sonically and still sound like the same band on the stage. Like, I know some of the old stuff as well, and it is doable, but…

Marc: Shadow Hearts might be. There’s one or two songs which might be possible, but before that, it’s just not possible.

Iain: Yeah, there’s maybe one or two things on Shadow Hearts that’s doable. So, The Beloved And The Hatred is the best step further back. I Will Never Let You Down off The Awakening is great. It’s just nice to get these songs involved to be able to present the evolution of where this band has been, you know.

Marc: That’s much further back than we usually go, because usually we just skip everything before I Am Nemesis, you know. Because that was kind of a little bit of a turning point in the band. So we usually skip everything before that. So on this tour we implement stuff like we just do on this tour, you know.

By Tobbe – Published May 13th, 2025