Drinking whiskey and listening to Dio.

He's very well settled in. He is a very technically proficient drummer with a great understanding of metal drumming. The way he approaches writing is different to our previous drummer too; we trade ideas and he works on drum parts outside of the rehearsal room which really speeds things up.

It's safe to say it has far eclipsed the critical response of the first record. It appeared in the top 5 and top 10 of numerous 'End of Year' lists for 2014 which was very encouraging, and the reviews in general were really positive. The songs from this album seem to work very well live, probably because they're a bit heavier and faster than previous stuff. I think there's still a lot of potential new fans who have yet to hear this album too, it's been a slow burn.

Intense, stressful, pressured, blurry… The band was falling apart at the time as we didn't have a permanent bassist and our drummer was in the process of exiting. We came back from a European tour and wrote it in about 10 weeks, before locking ourselves away on the west coast of Ireland in a little studio by the sea which was totally battered by Atlantic winds every day. The recording sessions were mostly 13 - 15 hours long each day, and we ended up doing quite a lot of writing and re-writing in the studio. We also drank a lot of whiskey and listened to Dio.

I don't know why people seem to fixate on the Celtic mythology thing but it's only a few songs here and there. The main themes on this album are the philosophical concept of Solipsism, time as a force of destruction, stripping away physical and metaphysical borders… An exhibition of the terrible tragedy we live in to use the words of the cover artist.

Musically I guess the usual influences of proper straight up heavy metal, classic doom metal, atmospheric black metal and folk music. However on this record we tried to put those influences aside more and try and communicate our ideas with a little more purity. The result is something kind of unique sounding but still essentially heavy metal. Thematically the post-apocalyptic landscapes featured in Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' influenced the overall aesthetic to a certain degree. I think we've only scratched the surface with this particular angle so it's one we may very well revisit.

Yeah certainly it's not a very cool place for metal. The scene is so unpredictable, I can't really explain it. You can have huge turnouts for shows you thought would be dead and then empty halls for bands you'd expect to be doing better. Thanks to the efforts of some dedicated promoters most tours worth talking about now have Irish dates, which is fantastic. We're spoiled in that regard, but the downside is the metal underground is still very small here, so the scene has become saturated somewhat and audiences spread a little thin. In terms of worthy bands you might not have heard of yet, Terminus, Stereo Nasty, Maverick, Celtachor and Malthusian are worth a look.

Yes we've begun jamming and putting ideas together, it's early days but some of the initial ideas are even darker than ever before. We're planning a certain vinyl release of sorts to come out in a few months time but we can't reveal anything about that just yet. In terms of our next album, things will start to come into focus in the coming months and ideally we'll be hitting the studio towards the end of the year. Possibly sounding more Dio than ever before too.

We have some shows with Angel Witch coming up in Belfast and Dublin, plus we hope to make a return to England and Scotland over the summer. As I mentioned we have a limited edition vinyl release planned for the halfway point of the year but essentially the majority of our energies will now be put into writing our next record.

Drink whiskey and listen to Dio.