“It was incredible, we had a great time! We obviously couldn’t play last year because of the volcano. We were all stuck at different airports and the flights were all messed up. That was a real disappointment and when you miss a show that big people are upset, but they gave us a great welcome back this year and I’m happy with that.”

The year before you were on the bill of Groezrock to play with your solo project Jasta, what happened with that gig?

“I cancelled it, because we pushed the record back. It’s now coming out this July. Maybe I’ll be back next year and play as Jasta, but I’m not sure yet. I’ve Kingdom Of Sorrow booked all summer and Hatebreed is booked for like the fall and a lot of the winter, so I don’t know when there’s going to be time to do the Jasta show. I’m going to talk about it with Century Media soon, ‘cause they will put out the Jasta record, and I’ll see what the options are.”

“We’ve always done side-projects when we had a little bit of downtime, but because Hatebreed is so busy until the end of the year it’s hard to schedule the other stuff. With Kingdom Of Sorrow for example we’ll do 30 shows this summer and after that probably nothing for the coming year or 2.”
 

“I think what we do is in between the Australian and European tour we’ll record a new album. So, if we do that we can probably have it out by maybe March, maybe April. It would be nice if we can release the new thing in March, because that means we can do all the European summer festivals. Normally during the summer we do the big U.S. festivals like Ozzfest, Mayhem fest and/or the Warped Tour, but next year we want to do all the big European festivals. And in between we want to visit the places we haven’t been much. Like we’ve never been to Poland, we’ve never been to Serbia, we’ve never been to various different countries in Eastern Europe, we rarely go to Scandinavia / Portugal, and for example we want to go back to Ireland.”
 

“We have some material already. Chris [Beattie – bass], Wayne [Lozinak – guitar] and I were in the studio 2 weeks ago, but it’s too early to play new songs live. Because Frank [Novinec – guitar] lives in Florida we just focused on these 2 festival shows and the set we’re gonna play and the songs we haven’t played live for a long time like ‘Final Prayer’ and ‘Puritan’. After these shows we go home, ‘cause Chris is having a baby and then we have a month and a half off. In this period Frank will rehearse the new songs and it would be cool if we could arrange it to at least play one new song on our European tour in June. We always try at least one new song live before entering the studio. We did it with ‘To The Threshold’ and other songs to see the reaction of the audience first, before recording it.”
 

“Ow yeah. Yesterday everybody wanted to hear ‘Hollow Ground’ and we usually don’t do that one. We also got many requests on Twitter for ‘Every Lasting Scar’ and we try to respond on all messages. With our new record we will relaunch the fanclub, relaunch the MySpace, make the Facebook better, cause I don’t think the Facebook is really up to date. For now it’s just rebuilding all those sites.”
 

“It’s cool and we’ve done it a few times in like November and December, but now the 10 year anniversary of Perseverance is approaching, so we probably will do that one next year in its entirely. Just a couple of shows though, because when you do a certain album some people don’t care or don’t know. Like with Satisfaction there are only 4 or 5 people that actually care. Everybody else wants to hear ‘Destroy Everything’, ‘Live For This’, ‘This Is Now’… But we definitely have fun doing it. We love to play those old songs live, but the energy isn’t really there, because only a few people know those songs. With Perseverance it will be different, because it’s a much bigger record, more kids know it. And maybe in 2013 we’ll do the Rise Of Brutality front to back, but you got to be careful though, because if you open up that door it’s very hard to shut it.”
 

“I saw it’s like a big caraval or circus, but I expect it to be good. When I walked through the crowd everybody stopped and asked me if he or she could take pictures and everybody was really happy. Nobody is too drunk yet and it’s almost 6 o’clock, but we have to play at midnight, so that might change. But the festival looks good and I was just watching that Norwegian band Kvelertak and they were great and they had a really big audience, maybe even up to 3.000 people. The good thing about such kind of festival is that fans bring their friends or anyone who isn’t into heavy music and then they see/hear and they might even begin to like it. Maybe we gain some new fans.”

“No, the approach is the same. We did the New England Metal & Hardcore Festival and that was a good show to figure out the set for these European festivals. When we played the biggest reactions were for the newer songs like ‘In Ashes They Shall Reap’, ‘Merciless Tides’ and ‘Never Let It Die’. We’re feeling strong about this setlist that contains about four tracks from every album we released.”

“Yeah, especially the Satisfaction songs. I always want to play ‘Before Dishonor’, I always want to play ‘Last Breath’ or ‘Betrayed By Life’ and fortunately it went well yesterday at Groezrock. We did however rehearse more songs, so hopefully we can start a bit early to do an extra 5 or 10 minutes to do a couple of extra songs like ‘Kill An Addict’ and ‘Smash Your Enemies’.”

“No, I don’t really miss it. After Perseverance exploded and people tried to sue me if they got hit by the microphone accidentally or when they claim I punched them in the face I was pretty much done with it. When you get to a certain level of success it comes with major problems and headache. I just read a story about a kid who broke his back during a show and I don’t want to be involved in any of that. I want people to be happy and to leave the show happy. We’re just too big and there are too many moving parts, too many people who work for the band, too many people rely on the band and we can’t risk that. Also if we fuck it up the bands that are smaller than us haven’t got a place to play anymore, because Hatebreed ruined it for them. When I do the Jasta shows I play some smaller places and then I will do four Hatebreed songs, four Kingdom Of Sorrow songs, five Icepick songs, some covers, Agnostic Front, Madball, whatever, and that’s fun. For Hatebreed it’s just not worth the risks.”
 

Yeah, we want to do stuff that’s new and fresh for us. We want to play the smaller cities for example. Not just go to France and play Paris, not just go to Holland and play Amsterdam or Eindhoven, we wanna go and play for the people that maybe don’t want to travel to those bigger cities. We’re doing it in Spain this time. We’ll be touring with a Spanish band and we’ll be trying to help the local scene and play in many different places there. We also want to go to South America, because the last time we were there we only did three shows. We also still want to play with Metallica. I spoke with Lars the other day at an award show and we’ve toured with the original Black Sabbath, with Machine Head, Slayer, Iron Maiden, but not with Metallica. When we can arrange this we’ll be probably doing a two-week tour, because they took Down, Lamb Of God, Gojira with them for two weeks and I love that. Furthermore I’m looking forward to the Perseverance Tour. I’d love to took the original support acts with us as well and say to for example Poison The Well that they can only play songs from The Opposite Of December record. There are always new ideas and new ambitions. Maybe a tour in The States, or even here in Europe, with Suicidal Tendencies… It would be cool to team up and just do it.”

“I don’t know. I have a Crowbar tattoo and that’s just basically all that you need. I have my own lyrics, Kingdom Of Sorrow and of course Hatebreed, but I don’t know man. Maybe a Ringworm tattoo. Furnace [singer of Ringworm] is a great guy and he has done all my tattoos by the way.
 

“Maybe because it’s free. I’m a freegan instead of a vegan: when something is free I get it. Furthermore I’m not that much of a tattoo enthusiast. I got all my tattoos when I was very drunk and I don’t really remember them.”

“That’s a tough one, because they both have made my favorite movies, but I’ll have to go with Stallone. We’re really hoping for a Hatebreed song in the next Expendables movie. Don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I would really like that. It would be fucking amazing!”
 

“Just thank you for your support! Leave us a message on Facebook or Twitter and look out for the Jasta album in July and the Hatebreed album early next year.”