This is the type of music that is closest to my heart. The music style that you hear on the album is more or less what I generally write when I write music. And when it comes to write dramatic and gruesome music, Metal works extremely well.

The main influences are bands like KING DIAMOND, MERCYFUL FATE, CANDLEMASS and PSYCHOTIC WALTZ. Besides that you can perhaps hint some influences of old URIAH HEEP, ALICE COOPER, early ENTOMBED and even the old Tim Burton movie; "Nightmare before Christmas". Funning thing though is that in almost every review I've seen we've been linked with a ton of different bands when it comes to how we sound and sometimes its bands that I've never even heard about.

I have always had a penchant for Rock Operas and musicals like "Jesus Christ Superstar", "Les Miserables" and so on, and that has of course had an influence when it comes to using different vocal styles and trying to tell a story through the music. That in combination with Adrian's haunting lyrics gives you the essence OPERA DIABOLICUS.

All the waiting gave us some time to polish the sound a little bit, but the album has more or less been ready for release for 2 years. It's been a lot of waiting so we're really glad that it finally has been released.

Not really. The reason for being creative and writing music is to make that kind of music that you really want to do. I guess it could be considered somewhat ambitious to do a conceptual album as a debut album, but for us we had no other choice than to make something that we really wanted to do. We sat the bar pretty high and went for it and I think we succeeded very well in reaching our goal when it comes to this album.

In fact,  the first 5 songs is part of the conceptual part of the album that dealswith the life, death and whereabouts of the 17^th century Hungarian Countess Elisabeth Bathory who's most famous (or infamous one should say) for trying to reach eternal beauty by bathing in the blood of young virgins. The reason we choose to do a conceptual piece around Elisabeth Bathory is that we wanted a story that incorporated different characters, both male and female, and that had a sinister feeling to it.

At the moment we don't have the budget for that, but perhaps in the future. When it comes to the video for the song "Blood Countess Bathory" we decided very early on that we wanted to have a different approach instead of a normal music video. The aim was to make it like a short movie where the focus should be on the actors, the story and the scenery instead of normal videos where you focus on the vocalists, this to emphasize the theatrical vein of OPERA DIABOLICUS.

We had a pretty good idea which kind of voices that we wanted for the different characters on the album plus that most people involved is people that we now and friends of friends.

As for now we're writing new material (it's a long process) and we have also intentions of bringing the album to the stage in form of a stage production. This will be a real unique thing and I guess that everybody that has seen the video knows what to expect when it comes to the visual side of OPERA DIABOLICUS. This will be a lot of hard work, but hard work is what makes it fun.

Thanks for the interview and I would really recommend people to go to YouTube and look up the video clip for the song "Blood Countess Bathory", put it on HD and with full screen because it's a real thrill to watch. And of course if you like the music, buy the album. That's the best way to ensure that there will be a sequel.