Dying Scene recently conducted an interview with MILLENCOLIN guitarist Erick Ohlsson, who talks about the band’s success, 20th anniversary festival, and their new studio album, which is supposedly due for release next year.
On the festival that celebrates the 20th anniversary of MILLENCOLIN, who formed in 1992:
I’m doing all the artwork and we booked the bands and all the decisions go through us like choosing stages and tents and a whole huge budget which is scary to be watching. It’s definitely do-it-yourself stuff.
On the band’s key to success:
We were just trying to record some songs that sounded like Californian punk rock which we were influenced by. That was in ‘92/93. Around that time this kind of music wasn’t played on the radio, tv or anything. It was hard to find this kind of music on vinyl record. You had to go to some special kind of punk rock store to pick up this sort of music.
Then around that time Nirvana, then The Offspring, became really big then in Sweden we were already there. It was like “hey, we got this Swedish band already sounding like this,” which was Millencolin. That gave us a really big boost in Sweden. We were everywhere, on TV, radio, everywhere back in ‘95/96. Our record did really well. That success made our record label bigger; they got distribution all over the world, which made us tour the world. All this was complete science fiction for us when we started the band. We wanted to work on it a lot, put a lot of effort in but we never imagined that this was possible.
On the new album:
I’m going to be honest. If we write a new album, record a new album, set up a marketing plan with Epitaph then the quickest it could happen would be April next year but that would mean we would have to start right away with everything and we definitely need a little bit of a vacation. We definitely are going to start to work on new stuff but I can’t say when it will be released.
The rest of the interview can be read here.
