'This Year Has Been Crazy': Blood Incantation On Critical Acclaim and Absolute Elsetour II
Friday, 03 October 2025
Written by Jack Butler-Terry
Photo: Julian Weigand
“This year has been crazy, probably the craziest yet,” Paul Riedl says, and given the past 12 months in Blood Incantation’s world it’s not hard to see where he’s coming from. The progressive death-metal titans have barely stopped touring since the release of their incredible fourth album ‘Absolute Elsewhere’ in October last year, but as he logs on to Zoom to chat with Stereoboard, the vocalist and guitarist cuts the figure of a contented, grateful, emboldened man.
And, to be fair, if you’ve listened to the Denver natives’ mind-bending music, crazy might seem par for the course. For the past 14 years, the quartet have mixed mind-expanding riffs with apocalyptic vocals while smashing through time signatures like asteroids through planets. That they’ve managed to meld disparate and challenging styles into something that has truly ensnared the metal and prog communities — not to mention garnering critical acclaim from NPR and Pitchfork to Metal Hammer — is very special indeed.
Now, they're set to bring their fully-curated live experience back to the UK and Europe for a run dubbed Absolute Elsetour II, rolling up in Bristol, Dublin, Manchester and Glasgow before hitting London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire. With grand ambition and heaps of motivation, the Blood Incantation train is truly rolling and won't be stopping for anyone.
For the uninitiated, how do you describe Blood Incantation?
“Cosmic music for cosmic people. That’s it. You can take it as liminal or grandiose as you perceive it yourself. We have no qualms of people saying ‘Absolute Elsewhere’ isn't a death-metal record. We personally consider it an extremely brutal prog record, so it doesn't bother us at all that people don't think it's tough enough.
“Part of the charm, I think, especially our first two records, is that you can hear a band firing on all cylinders to the best of their ability, which is not that great. I say that as the weakest link in the band, for sure, but you can hear that we’re about to fall off the rails at any time, and we get a little bit better with each album. And part of that is road-worn, you know? We’re always testing stuff out on the front lines.
“‘Absolute Elsewhere’ was the first record where we did extensive pre-production for almost a year. The music was a very long process of writing and refining, and we were meticulously organising it and changing things in our studio. We also didn’t play any of the material live. We just waited till the album came out, hit the road with it, and so there's been a different learning curve where we had never actually performed it live with a five-piece, with a keyboard player, until the album release show. And so, getting used to having five people on stage, having a lighting rig and stage production, it’s just an exhilarating process.”
‘Absolute Elsewhere’ became one of the most lauded records of 2024 — it’s number three on Metacritic’s list for last year, below only The Cure and Charli XCX. But you had a similar experience with ‘Hidden History of the Human Race’ in 2019.
“We genuinely thought, with [debut album] ‘Starspawn’, that was the first time anybody really liked a band any of us had been in. And this was the first time we ever had people in the audience who already knew the lyrics before we’d ever played in that town before, and we thought that was basically as cool as it could get, and that was 10 years ago.
“Then ‘Hidden History…’ exploded in a totally different way. That’s when we first started getting on magazine covers and we saw a little bit of the viral meme stuff, and it just spread everywhere. There’s a fine art painting in Helsinki of a knight wearing a chainmail hat and a ‘Hidden History…’ shirt and that’s on the wall at the Museum of Culture. But stuff like that started happening, and that was six years ago. We were like, “This is clearly as crazy as a band like Blood Incantation could experience.’”
Do you feel any pressure within the band for what comes next after a critically-acclaimed album?
“The pressure is mostly internal and it’s just about getting better. We really like to be a band that grows along with its audience and never wants to do a ‘Part 2’. We are always fine-tuning on the road — we were playing Giza Power Plant on our first tour in 2013 and didn’t release a recorded version of it until ‘16. Each recording, we get a little bit better at recording, we get a little better at writing. Each tour, we get a little more adept at playing the parts more accurately, at high speeds and high volume and all that. And so, the next stuff, it carries that tradition forward where it’s more technical, more progressive, more aggressive, more brutal, it’s denser and more atmospheric, it’s more melodic, more catchy, it’s also more beautiful.
“Each Blood Incantation record adds more to each thing, and the things that don’t serve it are discarded. Blood Incantation’s final form has yet to reveal itself to us, because you can only build the pyramid one brick at a time. You want to make a megalithic structure that lasts for eternity, you have to make it with good materials, and you have to assemble it in a very specific way. We take that stuff seriously, and so any external pressure, I really think it’s almost invisible.
“Maybe label and management people, booking people, they all want to have a certain reassurance, but I think we’ve worked with enough people that now we have a really powerful team who trust us, so all the people higher than us on the totem pole, they know intrinsically that the Blood Incantation formula works at its own pace pretty well for them. They know that whenever we do send them something, it’s going to be pretty interesting relative to whatever we’ve done in the past, and that we don't have any need to stress, because our process is working so far.”
That’s a good position to be in. And you said the next stuff is denser, it’s heavier, it’s more beautiful. Does that mean that there is a new album somewhere on the horizon?
“There's always new stuff. We’ve never stopped making music. I don’t think it’ll take quite three years, which is what it did last time. But there are a couple of things in the pipeline. But we want to try to do things a little differently, with different formats, different approaches. Right now, everybody has us pigeon-holed with these side-long prog epics, and these epic atmospheric songs. But the new stuff, we’re gonna try to do something a little different, where it’s simultaneously long and short, and it goes over multiple media.
“We want to have a multidimensional approach to media. We made a short film last year, we made an app, and we had a media book which expands on the story quite explicitly and has archival information behind the scenes. We would love to do movie stuff, video game stuff, soundtrack stuff. Anything in sound design or scoring, but also we would make comic book, video game, book, graphic novel, any of this type of stuff. Music is art, and art is a transcendental, limitless force of human creation, and we want to take it as far as we can.”
And in wanting to branch out into different media and do all of those things, is there anything that you’ve watched, or listened to, or read recently that’s really spurred that on?
“Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii movie: they just did the 4K remastered release. They’ve taken something 50 years old and made it a Billboard top seller again. We would love to do something like that, but it’s already been done, so we’d have to find our own way to do it. Mikael Åkerfeldt did the soundtrack for that show, Clark. That was fun and we’d do something like that, but again, that format is tried and true, so we would put our own spin on it.
“I think part of the fun about being in BI is that it’s only every couple years that we’ll hear a record that really inspires us to be like, ‘We have to step up.’ Not in a competitive manner, but just, ‘It’s physically possible’, or, ‘That’s the level we need to be trying to do our version at’. I definitely remember the last time, I think, that that happened was in 2016 when Gorguts did ‘Pleiades’ Dust’, their incredible 30-minute atmospheric song. That was mind-blowing, and I think we actually paid to watch a livestream from some festival in Europe, so we could see the new song at the time.
“Sometimes you don’t even need a band or an album, necessarily, to give you the right idea, either. You just hear some melodic combination or some textural component that’s like, ‘If you put a blast beat behind it…’ One of my old bands from 20 years ago used a melody from a video game called Chrono Cross. At some point, you have to hit these crystals in a cave in the right way to open some door or whatever. And it’s one of the most mournful things I’ve ever heard, so I just added a descending minor harmony on top of it and that was the basis for the song.”
I love it when stuff like that gets through. The future sounds interesting — but first, you’re off on Absolute Elsetour II. Is there anywhere in particular you’re excited to hit on this leg?
“We’re finally going to Greece, we’re going back to Istanbul for the first time in almost 10 years, we’re playing the Shepard’s Bush Empire. We haven't been to Spain or Portugal in almost 10 years. We’ve never been to Ireland, so we're looking forward to playing Dublin. We’ll be back to Bristol for the first time since 2017, I think.
“It's a short tour, but four of them are places we’ve never been before, three of them are places we’ve not been to in almost 10 years, and two of them are places that we were just at, but now they’re in a bigger room, so that’s always cool. But we’re excited to go over there because the first iteration of Absolute Elsetour, domestically and overseas, was one set, one opener. The second iteration, which we just came back from in the US, had expanded openers and an expanded back end of the set.
“So, we still play ‘Absolute Elsewhere’, but now instead of playing one or two songs at the end, we play a song from every album, so there’s something for everybody. And it’s actually pretty brutal; it’s like 75 minutes and it’s nearly twice the length of our last European headlining tour in 2022. The bands and the whole package are really awesome. I think Sijjin and Oranssi Pazuzu, there’s not a combination like that on any other tour — I think it’s cool that a lot of these venues are allocated mostly for mainstream artists, and they’re still packed out.”
Blood Incantation Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Mon October 06 2025 - BRISTOL Electric Bristol
Tue October 07 2025 - DUBLIN Academy
Wed October 08 2025 - MANCHESTER Albert Hall
Thu October 09 2025 - GLASGOW Garage
Fri October 10 2025 - LONDON O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire
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