Interview by Kris Peters
Forming a new band after having previously been a part of an international success story is never an easy task. But when you take two former members of popular bands and place them together to start a new project then the chances of beginning with a completely clean slate are slim to non-existent.
So it was when vocalist Jake E (ex-AMARANTHE) and guitarist Jesper Strömblad (ex-IN FLAMES), joined forces some seven years ago to create a separate musical entity in the form of Cyhra.
After putting out two critically acclaimed albums - Letters To Myself and No Halos In Hell - Cyhra steadily became accepted as a band in their own right, helped by the melodic metal approach that distanced the members even further from their past.
With their third album The Vertigo Trigger - already being touted as the band's darkest and most ambitious album to date - to be released on August 18, Cyhra finally look set to claim their full musical identity without the ever prominent shadow cast by days gone by.
Jake sat down with HEAVY recently to discuss The Vertigo Trigger and the long path to supremacy.
"We are ready to release our brand new album," he enthused, "and I can't wait to get it out there because it's been cooking for a year."
"There's absolutely no anxiety lingering on," he continued when asked how nerve-wracking this period just before the album comes out can get. "We don't want it to completely flop (laughs). The problem nowadays is you cannot say that an album is flopping in a sense because you can release a fantastic album, but the problem is people just don't get it. They don't know that it has been released. They can't find it because it's a fucken jungle with releases these days. There's so many bands releasing at the same time and people are listening on platforms, and it's really hard for people to understand how well an album has progressed because you have Spotify and Deezer and blah blah blah, so there's all these different platforms all over the world. A band like Cyhra, we are pretty big in Japan for example, but the Japanese people don't even use Spotify, so when we go in and check how many people are listening to us in Japan, and it's only 48 and then the record label comes back two or three months later and says you pulled 10,000 for that album it's like… they are not listening to Spotify then (laughs). You are a little bit anxious about the reception from your fans, especially now where it's gone three or four years since we released the last album."
In the full interview, Jake talks about the writing and recording process on The Vertigo Trigger, why it is their darkest and most ambitious album, self-producing the record and pros and cons of that, playing the whole album live in Japan before it has even been released, new guitarist Marcus Sunnesson and what he brings to the band, finding your own musical identity and more.