Richard Sjunnesson

(Original Facebook post 2017-05-21)

It’s been some eventful past days in Radionika Studios (Stockholm), to say the least. Dino Medanhodzic (the producer), Jonathan and I have diligently collected all our sweat, blood and tears in a gorgeous unguided-cocktail on those insignificant amount of square meters during well over 60 hours. And I’ve just now kind of landed back in life again from this very intense, creative and soul-emptying week. It’s indeed been long daily sessions and the few hours I’ve spent at home have just been functionality wise to sleep, eat (and to do my hearthstone quests hehe) basically. It’s no overstatement that after I laid down the last scream on the album yesterday I felt completely done as a human. But now when I regained some of my objectivity back and is listening to the rough fruit of our “hard labour”, it’s safe to say that you won’t be disappointed. This is good. This is in fact really good!

I didn’t spend a lot of time with the instrumental work until I got back from Spain and started to write the lyrics some 2 weeks ago. Getting more and more familiar to the songs it struck me then that there’s indeed new elements in the music and that it felt a bit adventures and exciting while still having the same integrity as the songs from the past three albums. There’s some really heavy stuff, and there’s the “standard” The Unguided songs that you all love, but there’s also some completely new aspects. I’m not even sure how we managed to get it together in this fairly short period of time and I don’t really remember how I got all the lyrics done during that week after my Spain vacation either, but all of a sudden all the pieces of the puzzle was in their correct place and all that I wanted to say with the album, lyrically, was right there.

Save from the “Brotherhood” EP I’ve not done much studio work with Jonathan or Dino in the past. So we needed to establish our method, like with every new individual you work with. It’s always a bit hard to say what that method is going to look like until you go in there and everyone start to do their thing. But I think we found a good way of working relatively early and they are both really pleasant to spend time with also in a studio environment. Towards the end of the week Jonathan and I joked about how we repeatedly came back to the same comment patterns, like two broken records, after a lot of takes. When he sang a part I always said: -“Don’t forget to do the one octave down harmony!”, whilst after my takes, he always asked: -“Can we try to do the screaming rhythm a bit more straight forward?” haha. Dino is an excellent producer and managed to get the best out of us without being “pushy” in any way. Very humble, but still attentive and there’s nothing that slips his eagle-eyes and bat-ears! Jonathan over-performed in every possible way on this record, both instrumentally and singing-wise. I’m so proud and impressed by his work on this album and can’t wait for everyone to hear it eventually.

Lastly I just want to thank everyone in the band that have worked extremely hard for this album. It’s a real honor to be among such amazing musicians and wonderful people. Everyone knew that this was a really important album and it’s been breathtaking to see how everyone just poured their soul into it in that regard.

Yours faithfully
/Richard