Rammstein is slowly but surely wrapping up their first brand new album since Liebe ist für alle da in 2009, and have already begun planning their world-dominating tour in support of it. Guitarist Richard Z. Kruspe had quite a lot to say about the record in a new interview with Revolver, such discussing as the arduous task of picking someone to mix the songs.
Kruspe jokes that "we're all basically in a room fighting for each fucking sound and that takes forever," though he does add that the band brought in live sound engineer Olsen Envolltini as kind of a St. Anger-esque band therapist. He also adds that the band fighting while writing is completely normal.
We're still in the process of working on it. Everything we do takes so long. Rammstein is such a different cosmos than any other band. I mean, we're all basically in a room fighting for each fucking sound and that takes forever! It's so funny. But it has to be this way. There's no other way, you know. There are seven guys in the room going through each detail of the song. It's exhausting, but it's exciting at the same time. At the moment, we're going through the last polish.
We had some test mixes made from certain big names and I wasn't really happy. I wasn't happy about the mix and the guys decided — I don't want to put any names here — but the guys decided on one certain name and I couldn't sleep. I woke up and I went, "I can't believe they want to do that. The mix was not good." At the last second, Rich Costey made a mix and, bang, it was there. I remember back in the day, our old producer Jacob Hellner, was trying different mixers and I think that Rich did a remix of "Du Hast." And I remember thinking it was unbelievable. He was able to put certain instruments in certain spots and I was amazed. He just nailed it.
The new music has a more "live feeling to it," and Kruspe adds that part of the reason it sounds that way is because band let go of each member trying to control the sessions, saying "We're trying to open up a little bit." He also discusses the band's hiatus and how the new album came to be.
When we started to come back in 2015 to decide what we wanted to do, I wasn't up for having a new Rammstein record at all. But we made a deal and said, "Let's get together with no record in mind and see how it works while we're playing." I didn't really have anything written and then I went back to my tracks that I had written for other stuff. I played them for the guys and I was surprised they liked them and wanted to make these into songs. So there are all these different moods than we usually have, even though you can tell it still sounds like Rammstein. But the songs are more melodic.
We took a lot of time actually to arrange the songs and we experimented with a lot of harmony structures in the songs, which we haven't done in the past because before it was all just to capture Till's voice. This time, I had the possibility to bring some melodies and some vocal lines in there. It just was a different process this time so it sounds to me not like any other Rammstein record.
Maybe you'll get to hear some of Rammstein's new album at their New Year's Eve party in Mexico.
