On Friday, I had the pleasure of speaking to Frank from Mass Worship about the band’s formation, his influences and their upcoming new album:
- What were your influences growing up and have they remained the same? And what inspired the name of the band?
“I was about 12 or 13 when I started getting into music, and my first sort of influence was punk music, especially American punk rock. I started playing instruments as well, and of course when you’re passionate about something you want to advance, and with punk there was a limitation to what could be achieved, and that was when I started moving onto other genres of music such as metal. I was 16 when I got into metal, and from there, well, things progressed. As to the name, well it’s a bit of a play on words as well as something that sort of developed. We changed the phrase mass murder to mass worship and then left if vague as to the meaning, to allow the listener or the fans to come up with their own interpretation.”
2. What’s the process of writing for the band?
“We’ve got a bit of a strict formula, as we’ve all been performing music for a long time in various bands throughout Scandinavia, so we’ve got experience and we’ve grown up doing this. Basically, I cook up the basic structure of the song, and send it to the group and then we assess the things that are there and pick the elements that we like and keep them, whilst discarding the elements we don’t like.”
3. Could you talk us through whether there were any themes explored for the new album, and if there are any songs on there that you’re really looking forward to performing live?
“I think we definitely explored some themes on the album and we definitely cherry picked different genres to enhance emotions with where the songs were going, and of course the delivery of the songs was mixed together with the vocal performances. Our vocals are quite short and urgent and to the point. As to songs performing live, well, we’ve released two singles so far, with the latest one ‘Celestial’ having just gotten a music video which is out now, and seeing the way people have reacted to the songs when we’ve been performing them has been fantastic.”
4.So, you’re about to embark on a tour, how do you transpose the songs from the record to a live setting?
“We try to keep the songs as close to how they appear on the record as possible. Though it does depend on the overlays on the songs. As we’re a new band, we’ve only got so much material to perform, so we’re going to be playing the record from start to finish on this tour, perhaps for the only time ever.”
5. What plans do you have for the future?
“So we’re playing a gig in Stockholm to launch the album, and then we’re heading out on a tour with Brutality Will Prevail in November and December, and then we’ve got some unannounced shows for next year and a few festivals as well.”
You can watch Mass Worship’s new single “Celestial,” below: