Hypocrisy's front man Peter Tägtgren has a lot of growling left in him. Photo: Denis Goria

I sit down with Tägtgren a couple of hours before his band, Hypocrisy, enters the main stage at the House of Metal festival in Umeå, Sweden. He seems relaxed and happy. The band has recently completed the European leg of their Long Time, No Death tour in support of their latest album A Taste of Extreme Divinity, and in May it’s time for North America.

“The tour has been really great so far,” Tägtgren says. “We didn’t set off with a huge package with a lot of famous bands, it was just us and Survivors Zero, a new band from Finland, but it’s been going surprisingly well.”

When you started in 1990, did you imagine yourself still playing in the same band 20 years later?

“No you don’t expect that,” he says. “But it’s fun to see that things have slowly been going in the right direction all this time.”

Mixing and matching

The Hypocrisy of today not only sounds very vital and hungry, the band’s current sound also works as a perfect combination of the two seemingly disparate elements that have made Swedish metal so influential around the world. On the one hand there are the hectic, almost punkish drum blasting and face-peeling growls of the classically oriented school of death metal. On the other hand there are the smooth melodic guitar harmonies and catchy choruses that take a song like Hypocrisy’s “Roswell 47” from memorable to unforgettable.

One thing that particularly sets Hypocrisy apart from its colleagues is the liberal use of keyboards. The band started using keyboards as early as their second album Osculum obscenum and the keyboard sound culminated with Hypocrisy, the largely mid-tempo-paced sixth full-length album.

After this, the band returned to a more guitar-driven sound on subsequent albums, but the keyboards aren’t completely gone. Mixing guitars and keyboards isn’t such a clash as one would think; Hypocrisy seems to know what works and what doesn’t.

Mikael Hedlund, Horgh and Peter Tägtgren of Swedish metal band Hypocrisy. Photo: Denis Goria

“In the beginning I was looking for a mix between Entombed, Morbid Angel and Deicide,” Tägtgren says. “That was my main inspiration at the time. First you imitate, and then you start to find your own path.

“It was when I started to experiment more with melodies that the music went in a different direction. By now I feel that we’ve found our own style, which is not very easy to do.”

To the beat of a different drummer

The return to a distinctly faster and more “death metal” sound might in part be explained by Tägtgren finding a creative outlet for his electronic experimentation in his side project Pain. But the addition of drummer Reidar “Horgh” Horghagen (also in black metal legends Immortal) in 2004 is another explanation.

While Hypocrisy had previously been relatively spared from lineup changes — maintaining the core of Tägtgren, bassist Mikael Hedlund and drummer Lars Szöke — in 2004 Szöke decided to leave the drumsticks, citing a declining interest in touring as reason. His replacement, Horgh, brought a new emphasis on technique and speed.

“You just have to listen to ‘Warpath’ [from the album Virus, 2005],” Tägtgren says. “I could never have done that with Lars [Szöke]; it wasn’t his style. He was more of a Suffocation blaster*, while Horgh has a solid black metal background which opened up more alternatives for me, giving me new inspiration.”

The voice of Hypocrisy

An added bonus to the lack of member changes has been that the band has had enough stable elements to maintain the Hypocrisy sound, despite changes in style. One of those elements is the vocals.

Since the third album Tägtgren has done the singing, providing the band with an impressive array of growls and shrieks. However, at the beginning it was far from obvious for him to handle the vocals. When Magnus “Masse” Broberg, who sang on the first two albums, left to join Dark Funeral, Hypocrisy had to decide what to do next.

“That’s why we did the EP Inferior Devotees — to try and see what we were going to do,” Tägtgren says. “I sang, and since it sounded okay we went with it. I had little previous experience from singing; I sang on Hypocrisy’s first demos, but it didn’t sound like too good so I wanted someone else to do it. By now I feel confident as a growler but back then it was pretty chaotic.”

Horgh, Tägtgren and Hedlund have a full tour schedule. Photo: Denis Goria

In his job recording and producing bands in his studio Abyss, Peter has seen many bands come and go over the years and the large amount of successful Swedish metal bands still baffles him.

Sweden has produced a lot of really successful and original metal bands and can be said to be one of the forerunners in metal, why do you think that is?

“I don’t know, it’s kind of weird,” Tägtgren says, “but I think that either you have it in your heart and mind, or you don’t. Same thing with Norway — they have huge amounts of good black metal bands, and Finland has tons of good power metal. It’s just hard to explain.”

Next year Hypocrisy will release a live DVD that was recently recorded in Sofia, Bulgaria, during the Long Time, No Death tour. The DVD will serve as a celebration of the band’s 20th anniversary.

Do you think we will see another 20 years of Hypocrisy?
“Ha ha, that’s impossible to say, who knows?” Tägtgren says. “Maybe not 20, but hopefully we’ve got a few more years in us.”

*Suffocation is one of the first death metal bands, whose drummer was famous for his blast beats — a type of pummeling, fast drum rhythm used most commonly in death metal, black metal and grindcore as well as some extreme forms of punk.

Johan Paulin

Johan Paulin is very happy that he’s able to combine his two major interests, music and psychology. He works as a project assistant at the Department of Psychology at Umeå University, and in his spare time he is a freelance writer and full-time metal head.

The author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in this article.