Dragged Into Sunlight do not do black metal the way you think black metal should be done. They don’t do pantomime costumes or cake their faces in corpse paint. They eschew personal identities altogether – not only do they refuse to acknowledge the names of any of their four members, but the entire band face away from their audience when performing live, leaving an immense wall of fog and an even larger wall of sound to speak for them.

We caught up with The Bassist from the band just before their set at Damnation Festival earlier this month, to find out just what the future holds for Dragged Into Sunlight. We probably should’ve asked him about that time we saw them play in Camden and the smoke from their onstage incense caused our writer’s face to swell up like he had dry-leprosy, but in all honesty, we forgot.

When it comes to performing your recorded material, is it a challenge to recreate your sound in a live environment?
It can be. I tend to find it is depicted by the sound on stage, the atmosphere of the actual venue, how many people are actually at the venue (as it changes the whole dynamic of the sound and how it’s projected)…a lot of bands in black metal unfortunately don’t really take much consideration of their tonality, or how they play their instrumentation – it tends to be just everything on full-blast. There’s not many soundguys who can do anything with that. They can’t do it justice.

I feel what we really try to do – and what we do really well – is that we spend an awful lot of time developing our tone, and making it project the right way no matter where we are. And we’re reknowed for having a really good onstage sound. I’m really looking forward to playing [Damnation] Festival as we’ve never had such a big backline before. The guys from Matamp, who build our amplificiation for us, have come down today to help set up. They’ve actually brought some additional cabs down – we’ve got eight – so I think we’ve got the biggest backline of the entire festival. I’m looking forward to cranking through it and seeing what it sounds like.

Watch the video for ‘Buried under Leeches’ by Dragged Into Sunlight. WARNING – NSFW:

Do you think that British black metal bands are at a disadvantage when it comes to gaining acceptance from British black metal fans? It seems that Scandanavian – and even American – black metal bands are more easily accepted than homegrown bands.
A lot of British people are quite savvy, and they do like what they like. A lot of them potentially might look against UK black metal as a bit a false, a bit try-hard, because they’re so used to the aesthetics and the approach of  the Norwegians, etc. A think it depends on the crowd – we tend to find we have a mixed reaction in the UK because crowds are so savvy, where as some European countries love us just because we’re really loud, or because we’re so in your face – different crowds in different countries take different things from our performances.

Speaking from a punter’s perspective, I definitely find it easier to accept a Norwegian band in corpse paint than I would if they were a British band.
I can’t take a British band wearing corpse paint seriously. The gimmick doesn’t work. Maybe it’s because as British people, we expect most British people to live in suburbs, and to have a mum and a dad and a dog and a goldfish, and to imagine that person as then going into the persona of ultra-black metal and wearing corpse paint, doesn’t seem legit, whereas the with the whole Norwegian thing, they’re all portrayed as living in forests and shacks in the middle of nowhere, with no-one around them.

If you look at a band like Akercocke, their image might seem a bit cheesy on paper – the suits, the whole “evil gentlemen’s club where they drink blood mixed with brandy” and all that. But when you saw them do it live it really worked.
[Akercocke's image] was quite vampiric, in a way. Upper-class metal.

‘Boiled Angel’ from the album Hatred For Mankind, by Dragged Into Sunlight (via brooklynvegan)

So what’s happening with Dragged Into Sunlight in 2012?
We’ve got an awful lot lined up. Since the last couple of years with this record coming out and being well received and being signed and all the rest of it, it’s all gone a bit crazy, probably at a rate of knots that we weren’t really prepared for. Outside of the band we’re all quite busy individuals; we’ve all got personal “business” lives – hence the aesthetic of keeping it very separate – we don’t want people to know who we are for that reason. Next year, it looks as though we’re going to do an American tour, which will be nice – I know there’s a lot of people keen to see us over there – and we’re doing Maryland Death Fest. We’re doing a European tour in the latter half of the year, and we’re hoping to release two, possibly even three, new releases next year.

We’ve got this track called ‘The Widowmaker’, which is a single slab of music which is 45 minutes long. It’s something we’ve been working on for the last two years. It took some time to make it work together, and we’ve just finished recording that in mid-October.

How do you go about composing a 45-minute track? Even with most of [Dragged Into Sunlight]‘s songs at around the 10-minute mark, writing a track that long has got to be tough, right? 
It’s been a very long-winded process, and it’s gone through many revisions. There’s about 30 minutes of solid metal, and about 15 minutes of introductory, intro, acoustic-esque music, but it tangents well together. It’s sort of like writing a [full-length] record, but with referencing riffs further down the line to bring it all together. It’s one long, glorified song.

We’ve also got another concept release in the second part of Terminal Aggressor [the first part of which being Dragged Into Sunlight’s limited-run 2009 EP], which is going to be another tape-release. It’s a completely different conflicting style to Hatred For Mankind [the band's debut full-length, which was re-released earlier this year].

Finally, we’ve got a split coming out with Gnaw Their Tongues, which is a guy called Maurice DeJong. He writes really, really abrasive extreme music, and he wrote and recorded [his part of the split] in just a few days. We sent our tracks over to him and he basically took every single wav file, and just chopped it all up, fucked them all up [in a good way], and sent it back to us with his two pence added. It sounds completely unique – I’ve never heard anything that sounds like that before.

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Hatred For Mankind, the first full-length album from Dragged Into Sunlight, was re-released by Prosthetic Records earlier this year. It’s a bit bloody good, and will (hopefully) tide you over until the first of Dragged Into Sunlight’s scheduled 2012 releases are…err…dragged into the cold light of day.