Pic courtesy of: Benighted "We’ve worked a lot to be where we are now, and we’re very proud of the accomplished travel until “Icon”. The music we play today is simply the best according to our spirit and the kind of music we love to play on stage to spill our entrails and break our necks at the gigs."

CR: Hey man first of how are you? And congrats on a hell of a record in Icon! Did you check our top 22 albums of 2007?
Julien Truchan: Yes! Thank you! It was a very cool surprise to learn that, so far, our album has been liked! The most important is now to come to your country show you what our music sounds like on stage!

CR: If I’m not mistaken, you guys stated in your bio that the band started out as a sort of death/black metal mix… how the hell did you guys ended up playing a death/Grindcore?
Julien Truchan: I don’t really know… things have evolved naturally and the black metal influence became smaller with years, we have progressed technically too, so we can play more interesting and different influences according to our schizophrenic identity and let the place to the simple energy and fury of our music, brutal, direct and groovy!

CR: Benighted has 10 years of existence, and it seems that Icon is really grabbing the attention of the international metal press, well deserved by the way! After 10 years in this band do you think that now the band is going through their best period musically speaking or that is just living their best “publicity” period?
Julien Truchan: We’ve worked a lot to be where we are now, and we’re very proud of the accomplished travel until “Icon”. The music we play today is simply the best according to our spirit and the kind of music we love to play on stage to spill our entrails and break our necks at the gigs.

CR: Do you have any idea of how many copies and how many countries got copies of Icon, or that is just a figure your label handles?
Julien Truchan: I don’t really know at this time, but the label seems satisfied with that, and we’re now contacted from everywhere in the world! That’s very cool!

CR: Benighted has already been touring and playing with some huge names in metal; how much of a “bust” do you think this experience has had on the popularity of the band, and what band that you guys have already played with is the biggest name in your view?
Julien Truchan: It’s always a cool experience to share the stage with great bands like Morbid Angel, Soulfly, Dying Fetus or Hatebreed. It leads you to give all that you have on stage to show what your band is capable of!

CR: Lets talk about Icon…

CR: When you guys release an album do you have some sort of “expectations” on how many copies you are going to sell and how many shows are you guys going to do to support the material, or that area is totally control by your label?
Julien Truchan: We don’t really care about that… when we arrive to the studio, we were very trusting in our new tracks and we’ve worked to be personally satisfied with “Icon” at 100%. The number of sold copies is not our first purpose in the band, we want to tour before all!

CR: Icon is very “mixed” I mean it has so many elements from different backgrounds, that somehow you guys managed to mix perfectly, make it work and deliver a unique sound that makes the album stand out from the rest! Icon can be put in the category, death metal or Brutal death or Grindcore or even technical metal and in all categories it can stand out; is there any specific “secret” to make all your ideas function on a very harmonic way, and don’t allow them to get out of control?
Julien Truchan: Benighted has now a solid identity, but what’s cool in the band is that it stays a perpetual evolving entity, and we don’t fear to experiment some new things, even if it can be a bit choking. Each song has to be easily recognizable and contains brutal, effective and interesting parts. We won’t record a track which doesn’t satisfy all of us.

CR: What do you think an extreme metal band should focus more on, melody and catchiness or brutality and speed? Which one of these elements is the hardest one to work in?
Julien Truchan: A never ending blast album is boring to me, I like to be surprised and sometimes disturbed by non waited parts. It have to be effective before all in my opinion, on a brutal line of course!

CR: The lyrics on Icon, they go beyond what you normally expect from a brutal metal band, they are very well though, and structure, I mean they just don’t talk about dismembering someone or having sex with corpses; they reach deeper into human emotions. How do you plan and approach each lyric line, what do you think makes any phrase or idea worthy of becoming a song lyric?
Julien Truchan: I always write lyrics in the same way, I write a story of a patient and his symptoms, and I place my vocals before really knowing which sentence will be there. I like to write the lyrics after having placed my vocal parts, because I have not the limit of the words to sing the way I like. In Benighted, the concept is very important, and all the songs have a double meaning.

	Pic courtesy of: Benighted "People who support the band know our way to compose music; we don’t put any limit in our music style, because we don’t like to repeat the same thing all the time. We experience some new things on each album, and we play what we like and find interesting and original. "

CR: Some songs are in French, this is something that you guys have been doing pretty much since you started out, do you think that it actually matters in what language a song is sing when we are talking about such and extreme metal genre? You know since is hard enough understanding what any brutal death band is saying because of the vocal style!
Julien Truchan: Sure, and I think people who don’t care the lyrics don’t make the difference of used languages. I kept the habit to write one or two songs in French in each Benighted album, it’s a hello to the fans of our country!

CR: According to an interview on Lords of Metal, the explanation for Icon is Infinite Conscience Of Nothingness, and the album is sort of the story of a man that falls in psychosis, quite an interesting topic! Why make the album a concept record? And what do you think is the tendency of almost all brutal death bands to immerse their music into this type of clinical, dark themes? Do you think themes like this are to death metal what Satanism is to black metal?
Julien Truchan: Thank you for the compliment! With “Icon”, it’s the first time that one of our albums speaks about the story of only one person and the songs have a link all between them. I find psychiatry is a very good theme for this kind of music, because it can be very insane, brutal and destructive, as death metal must be. But I also find that talking about blood, gore, zombie, sex and violence can be funny in this style of metal! He he!

CR: What I find the most refreshing about Benighted, is the fact that you guys don’t really seem to care too much about what some metal “purist” have to say when it comes to writing your material, you know adding some mellow parts, putting even tiny pieces of rap vocals, it is pretty obvious that you write what you want to play and I respect that even when I may not like some parts, but hey everybody has a fucking opinion about everything! Have you received many “negative” opinions about some things that you guys are putting into your albums? (I have to admit I love songs like Iscarioth)
Julien Truchan: People who support the band know our way to compose music; we don’t put any limit in our music style, because we don’t like to repeat the same thing all the time. We experience some new things on each album, and we play what we like and find interesting and original. About the hip hop part on the track “Grind Wit”, lots of people have been shocked, sometimes they love, sometimes they hate, but the most important is that we’ve never heard that our albums are boring! Often, the persons who spit on the new experimented things in extreme metal are the same who tell that all the albums look like themselves… so we don’t care!

CR: You work on a psychiatric hospital if I’m not mistaken… you have mention that some of your inspiration comes from that, don’t you feel bad exploiting those poor bastards! Jajajaja (maybe too much of a cruel comment I apologize!) my question is, can anybody really get cure after been on a place like that? And do you think we are not institutionalizing the real sick guys, who would you recommend for a long stay in a psychiatric hospital?
Julien Truchan: That’s true, I work there. And it’s a very cool way for me to evacuate all the stress I can receive at my work, and propose to talk about psychiatric pathologies in a very true and real dimension, without the first false ideas that anyone has on this kind of disease. Some of them can have a quasi normal life with an adapted treatment and it’s often difficult. For the rest, I think the sickest and most dangerous persons are maybe not curable and are often too intelligent to have a contact with psychiatry.

		Pic courtesy of: Benighted "I find psychiatry is a very good theme for this kind of music, because it can be very insane, brutal and destructive, as death metal must be."

CR: There are a lot of bands called Benighted, from different countries and genres, have you guys ever had any problems with some band complaining because you use that name?
Julien Truchan: We know, and it has never been a problem for us.

CR: In one of the previous questions I… pardon the redundancy here! Asked you about the early sound of Benighted and how it changed from death /black to death/Grindcore… and actually listening to “Psychose” I could see just how much into black the band was, especially in songs like “Lost In Catalepsy”, my question now is; do you guys play live this more “blackish” tracks live, and do you change them a little to portray what the band sounds like today or they are left untouched?
Julien Truchan: No, we don’t actually play songs of our two first albums, which are not in the spirit of the band today. But we intent to take one or two of these albums and adapt them for stage very soon!

CR: Would you say Benighted has some sort of “ideology” within its music? I mean is there something in particular that you will like to share with the audience that goes beyond metal music?
Julien Truchan: Just a very good and brutal moment in a friendly atmosphere where everyone takes pleasure and gives his entire energy!

CR: Ok man what’s on your short term goals and plans for Benighted?
Julien Truchan: We’ve been planned for great festivals like Inferno Fest, Neurotic Death Fest, Houten Feath Fest, Reperkusound Fest, Hell Fest, Rock Area Fest… so we’ve got very cool gigs in front of us! We have planned to make a video clip for the song “Slut” in May too!! So prepare yourself!

CR: All right I run out of questions here! Thank you very much for the time and congrats on a great record, if you have anything else to add please feel free to do so!
Julien Truchan: Thank you for this interview! I really hope we’ll be able to come soon to show you what Benighted looks like on stage! Stay brutal!!