1. Hello! How are you? Recently you have released your debut album entitled “Forging Metal”. How do you feel about it and which are your expectations from it? 

Hello Nick! Firstly, thank you so much for the opportunity of showing some of our work and ideas. We are great, thanks, and we are absolutely satisfied with the album and its acceptance until now! It is being amazing despite all the problems we've gone through. 

Yes, Nick, in fact we knew many bangers loved some of the old songs, so we have made some light modifications in arrangements to better fit the current line-up style – more classic and less power - and recorded five songs from this past material. They are “Funeral for a Viking” from the “Hazy Tales” demo, “The Beginning of the End” parts I & II and “Black Masquerade” from the “Revelation” EP and “Chrome Heart” from its single. Mixed with the previously unreleased classic metal tunes, this gave a good sorted album, and we are pretty satisfied with the results.

Yes, we have left some songs from the “Hazy Tales” EP and some unreleased songs out. Indeed, we already thought the album would be released with a too much “outdated” feeling, as earlier compositions date back to almost ten years ago! That's why we decided to include newer songs. Anyway, we don't discard chances of reworking on older songs for an album in the future. We already have a lot of new ideas and riffs for the next material, and we believe we can work them with some earlier ideas and get some punchy tunes.

Well, thanks, we are really glad you like! This name was idealized by bassist Fabio Nakahara, who founded the band together with guitarist Julio Bertin, in 1999. For us it has a lot to do with our world, so it is a kind of metaphor. If you look around with some critical eyes, you will realize that everything is an illusion. All the truth is hidden behind a curtain of lies… lies from churches, lies from giant corporations, lies from our governments. They take everything you have to satisfy themselves and do so much marketing on you that you indeed believe that it is all OK, and you even love them! We are blinded, living in darkness, and although it is our world, we can't see a step beyond this dense haze of lies. Our huge world is a small HAZY HAMLET. That is how we think. 

LOL! Yeah, some people think that is strange, but it is just a theme that we love. We loved it even before the band was established in ’99, and before all this Viking fashion came up. We like Nordic culture, its history, and especially its mythology, as it gives us so many metaphor possibilities. We have chosen this theme to be the main one on our albums and cover artworks, but it is absolutely not the only one. We are not stuck to this. If you get “Forging Metal”, you will see “Metal Revolution” is a pessimist vision on technology ascension over humankind. “Field of Crosses” is all about human degradation, and is somehow inspired by Bergman's movie Seventh Seal. “Forging Metal” is pure hard rock and roll, and “The Faces of Illusion” passes in a desert, a song about our disillusions. And there are still many other themes we want to write about.

Absolutely! In the past fifteen years we saw a bunch of bizarre metal labels rising up. Atmospheric-symphonic-gothic-melodic-black-new-metal bands started to be cropped all around, and harvested by a money famine musical industry that promoted this as original trends. Helped by the fast growing Internet, this proliferated like a plague, and dishonored good old metal labels. Power metal and thrash metal in the nineties simply had nothing more to do with respective German and Bay-area musical styles of the eighties anymore. We believe that bangers are simply getting tired of this all and are trying a call-back to vintage rock and metal, with their simplicity, attitude and punch. Hope music industry does not trash it all again.

Record labels were not an option for this debut. A few years ago, when we tried to contact, some didn't answer, some were not interested, and some wanted us to do all the work and then release it – and get all the money. We thought: “Let's do this by ourselves”. Well, we have started it more than 4 years ago, but we had many problems with some members’ health, the producer from the studio we chose to record, mix the audio, get bureaucratic things done, a drummer exchange... I mean, every two months some big problem showed up. The group almost split up, so we had to find some motivation. We then decided to work hard to finish it and release it independently, and thus keep HAZY HAMLET alive. So it is awesome to be here, working, playing and getting so many album praises worldwide! We are selling it mainly on our website and through digital distribution, like CDBaby, Amie Street, iTunes, Amazon MP3, etc. We are also closing direct deals with stores, and “Forging Metal” will be available in a few days at Sonic Age Records store in Greece, for example.

Finding a good painter gave us a lot of work either. We wanted something organic, something that had the smell of paint, you know. Not the contemporary bizarre collage done by computer graphics nowadays. After months seeking worldwide, I finally found the online portfolio of Celso Mathias, and was stunned. It would be great to have the cover done by a Brazilian artist, and Celso was extremely good and versatile. I contacted him, and although he had worked with some fantastic HQ artworks before, he had never made a heavy metal cover. We sent him our ideas, some mythology references, and the old songs for him to listen. In a week he had some delighting sketches in our e-mail. No thinking, he was contracted, and we even got the original framed in our studio. We are satisfied and very happy with the result!

Wow, hard question! Well, “The Faces of Illusion” is the most democratic, with an equal amount of work from every band member, but I'd rather say the most completed and representative is “Chariot of Thor”. It has some power metal in the main riff, but most of its tempo is really classic metal, and this is good to show our transition. It also has a lot of atmosphere, some variations, a solo with a lot of feeling, choirs, and lyrics about degradation of humankind using Norse mythology metaphors. It has everything we love, so this is it.

Where have you found this?! In fact it was a rhythm guitar appearance, and it's been some long years ago, now! LUMINUS was a black metal project of a great friend of ours, Duda Capetto.  He is a genius composer and did everything, keyboards, voices, drums, it was the kind of a one-man-project. He even played drums in a HAZY HAMLET concert, in  year 2000! However, once he wanted to record some LUMINUS songs, and as he knew I loved to work on some riffs, called me to arrange and record rhythm guitars for his demo. I was honored, and it was a pleasure, but most of the work was still his. Anyway, he had credited me on the demo, and I am happy it came to you. Duda Capetto had moved to Spain, and LUMINUS is paused for now. At least is what I think, as I did not receive any news about it.

Happily not many weird descriptions... maybe it is one that I heard once, saying that HAZY HAMLET is a melodic metal band with a true metal singer. Come on! We are not like this. HAZY HAMLET is not melodic metal, nor true metal, nor any shit metal label. We are a heavy metal band with a rock and roll soul, and that is it. Simply some classic, epic and valved heavy metal, like it or not, and if you are not convinced by our recent debut, wait until our next album. We are working on some pretty heavy classic tunes.

No, Nick, in fact we have to thank you so much for your praises to the album and for this opportunity of showing a bit of HAZY HAMLET! Thanks surely also to the bangers, who are hugely supporting us. Being independent does not make us sound better or worse than anybody, but it really makes it a lot harder. So please, keep pushing and supporting independent heavy metal and rock and roll, national or international. A huge hug from the “proud to be loud” HAZY HAMLET metal family!