Interview: Insolvency

In January, the French metallers of Insolvency released their debut album. It is called Antagonism Of The Soul and is released via Send The Wood. Recently, DutchMetalManiac’s Tim van Velthuysen interviewed Insolvency’s guitarist/vocalist Valentin.

Hey, congratulations with your debut album, Antagonism Of The Soul, it’s really nice!

Thanks for the support dude!

How does it feel to have your debut album released?

We felt a little bit stressed at first but very excited too! We’ve been working on this album since 2 years and that was our first one.
It was hard and difficult at several points but we’ve increased our level as musicians.
Also, every detail on this album, the sound, the cover art, and everything is made with so much care. We’re very very proud of this release, and most feedback are good so it’s a positive point.

Insolvency was formed in 2012, can you tell us something about its history since that moment?

Indeed the band was formed in 2012 with me and a school friend, Jules. We often played guitar in my room and we decided to make a band to first play some covers and do little bit of song writing. We’ve quickly found Mickael as the drummer, it was a friend of a friend of us. Pierre was in the same classroom of Jules and he was proposed to play bass in the band.
At the beginning we had only 2 written songs and we played some covers of bands like Children Of Bodom, In Flames, Metallica.
We were looking for a singer but nobody had the voice we wanted for the band… So Pierre and I started to sing. Time has past and we wrote enough songs to have our own setlist. In 2014 Jules decided to quit the band and few months later we found Bruno, that was a new start for us!
He arrived with lot of motivation and he pushed us all to become more ambitious and to follow our dreams.

You play metalcore, what is that makes Insolvency unique in this subgenre?

We love melodies and that’s a main thing for the band. We all look for it in music we listen to and we want it to be noticable.
Insolvency is full of different inspirations! Mickael listens death metal/prog metal/black metal, Pierre listens metalcore/deathcore, Bruno and I listen heavy metal/melodic death/guitar heroes. We also listen to some other genres of music that inspire us, like pop music, indie rock, electro and rap.

I think Insolvency is unique because the mixing of all of these inspirations is perceptible in our music. But mainly we want to preserve the metalcore style which made us love the genre like Bullet For My Valentine, Trivium and As I Lay Dying in the 2000’s. At this day “modern” metalcore bands simplify so much in their music, but we continue to love and to play old school metalcore, with more technical parts. So Insolvency is metalcore but include heavy metal, with melodies and very loud modern breakdowns.

For Antagonism Of The Soul you signed with Send The Wood (with the album distributing through Season Of Mist). What makes Send The Wood the best label for Insolvency at this moment?

Send The Wood was the label who matched with our expectations for this first release. We’re very satisfied of the work of the owner! Thanks to him, our album has been out on every main store and on every digital platform!

In the studio you worked with Jim Pinder and Carl Bown, how was working with them?

That’s was a very formative experience! Firstly cause they’ve worked with most of bands we love, like Trivium, While She Sleeps, As l Lay Dying, Bullet For My Valentine..  And we wanted to have this kind of sound with our own touch and that’s why we wanted to record this album with them.
They pushed us to make our best on every track. They worked on our sound with so much care and ambition to hit our expectations.
They were full of great advice on some song structures, music and lifestyle of music in general. They are very cool as persons and that was a pleasure to meet them professionally and personally.

What made them the perfect ones for this job?

As I said, they worked with many bands we like and that’s was an evidence for us to contact them. Mostly we’ve really liked the sound of the drums on the Brainwashed album of While She Sleeps on which they worked too.
When we went to record drums in their studio, Mickael had the chance to play on the While She Sleeps’ drum kit, who was recording the album You Are We at the same time.
All ingredients were reunited to have the sound we wanted to our first album and great gear and people.

The cover of Antagonism Of The Soul is really nice! Can you tell something about it?

It was designed by Daniel McBride who works for Sumerian Records Designs. The process was the same as that of the search of the studio, we’ve looked for some band designs we loved and we choose to contact him cause he made very cool stuff for bands like Betraying The Martyrs, Asking Alexandria, Born Of Osiris… We contacted with our ideas of the cover and Daniel has immediately approved them.
On this cover we wanted to represent a girl with a soul divided. On each side of her you can see a part of her soul, the bad and the good who live in each human and who divide us at every moment. The girl model is a Suicide Girls named Mytika who is a friend of friend of Bruno. She did a great job for the pic with the photograph by Charly Desoubry, then Daniel perfectly wrapped it up through the whole design art work.

You already announced a show in Warsaw, can we expect more Insolvency shows in the near future? Maybe coming to The Netherlands?

Yeah we’re working on our booking schedule. We’ve planned a UK tour in the end of September, we should announce it to the public very soon.
We’ve had this very cool show in Warsaw and we were very excited to play over there, and that push us to keep booking. We hope to play on most places as possible, including the Netherlands for sure if we have the opportunity!

Any other future plans for Insolvency you can already tell us something about?

Main ones are now known at the moment, we’ll also release some live videos (working on it).
We also keep songwriting and thinking about what will be cool for our next album, but yet too early!

Thanks for your answers! Is there anything you want to say to our readers?

Thanks too! Stay connected on our socials (facebook, twitter, Instagram) to see more news, shows, videos, from us! Check out our album if not done yet and see you soon!

Insolvency Facebook
Insolvency Twitter