HELLOWEEN Guitarist Talks '7 Sinners' In New Interview

Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal of Metal Assault recently conducted an interview with guitarist Michael Weikath of German power metallers HELLOWEEN. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Assault: Your new album, "7 Sinners", is going to be released in October. How are you feeling at this point?

Michael: It's got a brilliant sound. It's great stuff, really good and it took some effort to make because we've been recording on 432 hz instead of 440.

Metal Assault: I was just curious to know how you came up with the album title.

Michael: We have one track on the record called "Where The Sinners Go", which is a [Andy] Deris [vocals] track and I wrote one that's called "The Sage, The Fool, The Sinner". So we had a talk and said we're not going to change any of the two tracks we've done but with the term "Sinner" instead may be we would call the full album something along the line of "Sinner". Deris agreed to that. The demo tracks that I had on my iPhone, I added in iTunes the artwork of the seven-point star, which is a heptagon or heptagram, whatever you want to call it. He liked that design too, and said it's looking good. We thought of somehow putting that on the album cover and call it "7 Sinners", like the 7 points of the star.

Metal Assault: Everybody is saying that this is your fastest and heaviest album. Would you agree?

Michael: It's the fastest and heaviest in years. If you want to compare with "Walls Of Jericho" which was may be the roughest and fastest that we've done in the beginning, this new one sounds much better than "Walls Of Jericho" which doesn't quite live up to today's standards. Talking of the drum techniques that Dani [Löble] has used, he's had ultra-fast parts on this one that cannot be compared because you need certain technique to achieve those beats otherwise the drummer wouldn't be able to play that. So, as he is capable of those things, he wanted to show them off.

Metal Assault: For that last U.S. tour, you toured here with GAMMA RAY. What are your memories from that tour?

Michael: We have a guy based in Nashville, but he's a German. He used to work with ACCEPT and knows the place inside out. He's got lots of experience in the States and that guy took care of organizing the tour and everything. It went down extremely well. We had good places, good clubs, many fans, great accommodation and everything. It was contrary to tours that we tried before which were frustrating and didn't work out as well. So due to the circumstances on the last tour, we're looking to do more.

Metal Assault: Last year you also put out the "Unarmed" album to celebrate the 25th anniversary. How was the experience of doing that acoustic segment?

Michael: We were very proud to be able to do something like that. We had the Prague Symphony Orchestra and then we had some other special renditions. Actually, there is a section of fans don't cherish it that much and didn't like it as much as I hoped for, but then on the other hand we had the occasion to do it so we had to. It was an option we wanted to try. You've got to bear in mind that some of us were born in '62. I am a kid of the '60s and '70s. But you've got to respect the fact that there are fans out there that don't like it, but mainly it's the 25th-anniversary album and as for the classic orchestra, we think it's great and a few other people think it's great.

Read the entire interview from Metal Assault.