International Rock band SOEN recently released their sixth studio album, Memorial, via Silver Lining Music. Their five previous albums struck an interesting balance between having varied sounds and emotional beats, and having an overarching idea suggested in the album title and drawn from something the band had on their mind at the time. With Memorial, they look at the many different angles of conflict through the lens of its impact on ground-level human life and toll that takes. Whether it’s the families whose children go off to become soldier, the soldiers who face the pressure to be heroes, and later struggle with the trauma of war, or just ordinary citizens who face loss, SOEN teases out the cost of conflict on these tracks. Taken individually, the songs are also thought-provoking and sometimes inspiring.
The band features lead guitarist Cody Ford, who is Canadian, bassist Oleksii “Zlatoyar” Kobel, who is Ukrainian, vocalist Joel Ekelöf, who is Swedish, keyboardist and guitarist Lars Enok Åhlund, who is also Swedish, and drummer Martin Lopez, who is Swedish but originally hails from Uruguay. The band, who are currently on a European tour, make up an international team, but they have also travelled the world together bringing their music to new ears. In that time, their observations on their travels have led to a lot of their inclusive social commentary. I spoke with Martin Lopez about songwriting for Memorial and the ways in which conflict is at the heart of the new album.
It seems that your albums have always had a certain focus, with certain ideas, and that must affect how you write the music to accompany the right mood. Is that true for this album, Memorial, also?
It’s not that we write ten songs with that in mind. It’s more that you have to keep on writing and you find that focus for the album. All the emotions that we want on the album are there. We’re not a band that tries to write hits or be on the radio, we just write what we want. I think, for these songs, we just wrote until we actually found a balance within those songs that would give us an album. We wanted deep emotions. Sometimes we end up writing way more songs than we need. For this album, we wrote around 60 songs!
That’s crazy! Amazing.
We just pick what we need. You just have to keep on writing all the time. I tend not to stay too long working on the same piece unless I know that it’s something that’s magical. Otherwise, I just keep writing and keep writing to find those diamonds.
What happens to the other material after you make a selection.
Then we throw it away.
Nooooooo.
But you have to do that. There’s nothing less inspiring than to start writing a new album with old material. The plan is always to write the best album ever. If you start with your head not wanting to work on something, that’s not inspiring. It’s hard.
When you have all these songs, and then you think, “What is this album going to be?”, you might find that certain ideas are already there, coming up in multiple songs, and they fit together, do you kind of recognize what you’ve been thinking about recently?
Basically, yes. But it’s very probable that in the band we have similar ideas because we spend so much time together in airports, buses, and studios. We see the same things and feel the same things, so when we start writing, we very often are bringing up the same themes. We want the album to basically have the same theme, but at the same time, we don’t want to force that or be too repetitive. So that’s one way of picking stuff. We also take things from different sources, which makes things different.
Do you all have conversations about the world and what concerns you? This album shows a real concern for the level of conflict and friction in the world right now and how that affects individuals.
ML: Yes, that’s been really big. There were two events, two happenings, that fueled this album and caused us a lot of anger. They turned a normal SOEN album into a more aggressive album for us. One was the war and the invasion of Ukraine. Then, the protests in Iran, where this young girl, Amini, was being attacked for wearing her hijab incorrectly. Those two things happened when we were touring in the Middle East. They affected us very deeply and that came through in our music. Some people think that their ideologies cannot be translated to people from different backgrounds, but I think what’s important is that, as humans, we all have the same goals. I think everyone does.
Every child should be able to go to school, every person should be able to have food on the table, the only thing is that we see different ways to get there because of our different political backgrounds. But there’s a unity in the fact that we are searching for the same things. I think the main problem we have today is that people are more interested in fighting amongst themselves, with the right wing being called racist homophobes and the left wing being called communists. Our music and our message has always been very interested in talking about these things.
I do feel a lot of anger on the record, but I think the bigger thing is concern for human beings and the suffering that is caused by these conflicts. One of the tracks seems to openly talk about the effects of war, the title track “Memorial.” That one made me think of the death toll in Ukraine.
All of these songs are connected to the idea of war, or the figure of the warrior, who is sent out by his country to do whatever he has to do, then he comes back. In the song, “Icon”, we see the same character and how this affects their family, having a son or daughter go away to war. We also see how the people who experience conflict in their own country feel.
I was wondering about the song “Icon”, which offers a different perspective on the same ideas of conflict. We see the hero worship that goes on, the pressure to be a hero.
Yes, there’s no black and white, but it’s something we learn about and observe by touring, actually. In every country where we tour, we can see completely different perspectives. The stories are very different in different countries surrounding the same events, even, depending on the news they are getting. It’s hard to know what is right and what is wrong, there’s just the fact that someone is bombing houses with women and children, and when you do that, you’re an aggressor. None of this is about ideology, it’s about fucking cold-blooded murder of people.
For that reason, the ideas on the album are very universal. In some ways, this could all be true when talking about war 100 years ago, or 50 years from now, since these are not political songs.
Hopefully, yes.
What about a song like “Unbreakable”? I think there’s a lot of anger there, but also a rising sense of hope.
“Unbreakable” is about blindly following ideology and not being able to see beyond that. It’s stronger than us, and we can’t find a common path, because dialog is not open. We are told that people with different ideologies are our enemy. Then it’s difficult to find common ground. The song is about not thinking twice about things.
The hopeful aspect is interesting because the lyrics are reaching out to people to resist this trend. At one point it says to let the “spirit” command their sense, like the human spirit, rather than looking towards authority figures. It puts things back in human hands.
Always. We are always trying to bring a little bit of hope to people, otherwise life becomes unbearable. I think the overwhelming majority of people wants everyone to have a good life. That spirit is within us but on the way to being adults, we lose a lot of that. We compete about everything as adults, about who has the most money, and equate that with who is the happiest. We just get lost in that.
We get lost in trivialities.
Yes! All you have to do is look at Instagram and see these tremendous battles over who has the most delicious-looking breakfast pictures.
[Laughs] But we need to know if someone else’s is more delicious!
It doesn’t need to be that way. You can be happy with what you have.
We spend so much time on those things that there’s no time to actually live.
Exactly. I spend so much time wondering if my neighbor’s child is going to be more beautiful and successful than mine. I don’t want to compete about that. My child is going to keep their inner child, anyhow.
The video that goes with “Unbreakable” is a live show video where you played in front of an audience. I think it’s a really special video because of how much it shows the audience’s reaction. A lot of camera time is spent on them. And they are reacting to that song so much! They have big emotional responses to that song.
Our show gets quite emotional. We really focus on our fans. Our shows are really for the audiences. It’s something that we wanted to celebrate with a live video. It shows not only our performance, but our crowd, the most important part of all this. It’s what enables us to be successful, make music, and makes us happy. It makes us happy to know that people really care about coming to our shows and open their minds, and are vulnerable about the music. They open up to it. It’s a special thing.
I found it reassuring to see so many people responding to the ideas in that song. That gave me hope for people, that they will stand up and think for themselves.
I think a lot of people are open and able to be more vulnerable if they need to be. I think the media paints a picture that’s not exactly reality. But when you go on tour, and you meet everyone, it’s different than the media suggests. The media suggests that everyone in the Bible Belt in America is a Trump supporter and a racist, and then when we went there, they were the most caring people.
They probably had very different ideologies, but they were kind people who cared about their friends and their families. Then we had a show in Tunisia, we thought it might be dangerous there, but the people were beautiful, kind, respectful, and warm. Then, when we were going to play in Mexico, we were worried about the cartels, but everyone was so great. Real life is not what we see on TV.
Those are stereotypes, not only of people, but of situations, in a way.
Yes, and not only that, those are the things that get the “clicks” online. I’d love to see a headline that said, “Muslim Guy Walks Christian Elderly Lady Across the Street”, but you’re not going to see that, even if it happens. It’s not a profitable headline.
