In November the Spanish metallers of Steinbock released their Till the Limit album. DutchMetalManiac’s Henric van Essen already reviewed Till the Limit here. Now he also interviewed them.
Hola, como estas?
What’s up DutchMetalManiac! It’s a pleasure to be here with you guys!
That was about all the Spanish I am capable of, so I’ll continue in English. The first thing I noticed when picking your album for a review was your rather unusual name. What is the story behind it?
Our name came from a book about native fauna in Catalonia, where we live. We found a chapter that talked about a goat from the mountains. Its name was written in several languages and one of those was German: Steinbock. Oh shit, we thought, it’s a good name for a band. The rest is history!
When doing some research for my review I found almost nothing about you guys. Can you tell us a little bit about Steinbock, its history and its members?
All began in 2013. Camilo and Joanjo met each other during an improvised rehearsal and, together with a bassist, they started a power trio. Mark joined the band one year later. With this formation we released 2 EP’s. The last member Rafa joined the band almost two years ago to replace the previous bass player. His incorporation was a crucial part in our development and since then the band has gone through a continuous process of learning and growing up until now. For us, our first album Till the Limit, alongside Art Gates Records, feels like the beginning of a new chapter.
Congratulations with Till the Limit, I think it’s a great album. It only took me a few seconds to hear the unmistakable resemblence to Metallica in your music. What is the link between you and Metallica if there is one in the first place?
It is always the same old story for us and we always give the same answer. It has to do with Metallica’s musical legacy. They created a musical style in which many bands nowadays feel comfortable. It’s not like we want to sound like Metallica, but we also cannot deny the influence modern groups receive from them, and from many other groups like Avenged Sevenfold, Trivium or classic stuff like Dio or Mötley Crüe. Maybe Camilo’s voice is at times similar to Metallica lead singer, but this motherfucker rocks like James, what can we do? Hahaha
Despite the obvious similarities in sound you manage to maintain an identity of your own, which is one of the reasons I like this release so much. How do you manage to do that?
Well, we all work hard on the compositions. All the members of Steinbock are very diferent, musically and personally. Everyone contribute on the idea to create a song. We are always looking for a mix genre. All our personal influences build Steinbock’s identity.
What else, if anything, influences your music?
Our days are a big influence for our songs. If we are angry, sad or happy we throw all our feelings to our music. Obviously we watch, for example, a lot of films and we are always thinking about mixing other arts to our music. Whether in structure terms o directly in our lyrics.
Where do you draw inspiration for the lyrics from?
We usually write the lyrics when the music is done. Our lyrics are pretty critical to society, the world and our realities. For us it is important to be a little mirror of our lives. We don’t want to create fantasy worlds when we can talk about all the good and bad things of what we see.
The song Beer is the odd duck in the pond, but I nevertheless loved it as much as the rest. Is there a story behind this particular song?
We love to party, and we like beer. It’s about one night, from the beginning to the end, just for fun.
For us it is the odd duck too in a lyrical perspective because traditionally thrash metal doesn’t talk about this. It’s more a metal song with rock & roll lyrics. We don’t want to be a true metal band, we want to do whatever we like and, as we said, we love to party, and we like beer.
While listening to most of the songs I could easily imagine them sounding awesome live. Do you have any touring plans and if so, will you be visiting Holland as well?
We would love to tour all over Europe. Our continent is huge and in North Europe rock and metal are very respected genres. We think our album is pretty good but live it is very powerful. We must play it live everywhere.
Do you have any future plans with and for Steinbock you are willing to share with us?
For now we are working hard on promotion and work. Right now we are spreading our music to the world so we need to keep it on!
Apparently you guys like beer, you even wrote a song about it, so it’s only fair to ask you a question about it: What is your favored brand and/or type of beer?
ALL OF THEM! But if we had to choose maybe we will pick an Stöut or something like this.
That’s all for now, I’m going to try to end in Spanish, with a little help of Google, hopefully it is accurate 🙂 : Muchas gracias por la oportunidad de entrevistarte, es muy apreciado. ¿Hay algo más que quieras compartir con nuestros lectores?
In case Google (and I as well) failed us once again I’ll add the English version of the last question as well: Thank you very much for the opportunity to do this interview, it’s much appreciated. Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?
Your Spanish is better than our English! Thanks to you guys for the interview and we hope you like our project. You can follow us at Instagram, Facebook and YouTube as SteinbockMetal. Big hug from Lleida for you and all your readers. Keep on rocking!
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