Interview:	ALESTORM
Title:	Chaotic storm of fun

If you listen to the new album „The Thunderfist Chronicles“, you will inevitably be infected by the carefree joie de vivre of these Scottish pirate hearts!

The folky Power Metal of the quintet, which is masterfully controlled in every second, crashes into the ship's timbers this time with an immense amount of shanty music. This means that a rampant pirate party is the order of the day, and the latest follow-up to the 2022 jug-lifter „Seventh Rum Of A Seventh Rum“ provides the wildest soundtrack imaginable. Captain Christopher Bowes takes command with a broad grin on his face: 


Congrats for the newest saltwater attack, assisted by fully unleashed shanty powers - love it! How does it feel for you to release it now after the exact 3 years of album pause?

„Well, we released an EP last year, with some pretty good songs on it, but I guess nobody pays attention to those haha. So we’re back on the grind of making albums again. It’s fun, I love making music – I wasn’t really expecting to have an album yet but it all just sorta fell into place late last year. I love all the excitement that comes with releasing a new album, even doing all these press interviews!“

Damn, why does this new song collection sound so extremely positive, fully carefree and gigantically relentlessly exuberant? What the heck did you guys to get it that way? 


„I think in the past we’ve had these feelings of ‚gotta give the fans what they want, gotta keep up with what all the other big European Metal bands are doing‘. But now I don’t care anymore and I’m just writing and releasing whatever feels good to me at the time. We’re not trying to copy our old songs - which is what a lot of loud fans want us to do -, and we’re also not chasing mainstream success by writing tons of disco pop Metal anthems that are exactly 3:15 minutes long in the style of Sabaton or Powerwolf or whatever it is the kids like these days. It’s just a lot more chaos and a lot more fun - but also a lot more serious songs too which is kinda crazy for us.“

How did the idea for the title "The Thunderfist Chronicles" come about and mature?

„I hate naming albums! None of the song titles jumped out as a good album title - imagine we’d called this album ‚Banana‘?! And so then when that doesn’t work you go looking for obscure lyrics in the songs to use as a title – and there was nothing that worked there either. But there was 3 songs that are kinda linked by a story – ‚Frozen Piss 2‘, ‚The Storm‘, and ‚Mega-Supreme Treasure‘, are all connected in references to forgotten Sumerian gods and the treasure of a legendary hero called The Thunderfist – so it just made sense in the end.“ 


How did your tours and gigs go last year - only roads, roads, roads, stages, stages, stages, action, action, action? Or some vacation in between? 


„We’ve been very busy the last 12 months – but I guess we’re always busy. Touring is a full time job for us and our crew, so we’re non-stop playing shows the whole year. It used to be that bands would go on tour to promote the album and make money from record sales, but of course now it’s the opposite, and it feels like we spend money on releasing an album that nobody pays money for - god bless streaming - to promote our tour, which is how we afford to survive. But we’re lucky in that we’re popular the whole world around, so we can combine vacations and tours. We got to go to South America, Japan, all over the USA, and the Mediterranean, for free! It’s kinda nice.“

Was there any time at all to write new songs? Or did you just come up with them anyway while drinking karaoke on the tour bus?

„Yeah most of the songwriting took place when I was home in the rare downtime between tours – May, June and September – so like I said earlier I even surprised myself when I realized we had enough material to book ourselves into the studio in December to record a new album. So that was nice. Believe it or not, it’s quite complicated work writing our songs, and I don’t think I’ve ever written a good riff while drunk!“

Can you possibly name any differences in terms of the songwriting this time compared to the album's predecessor „Seventh Rum Of A Seventh Rum“ from 2022? 


„So the songwriting team, like before, consists of me, plus Michael Barber - who you may know as the guy who does keyboards in Gloryhammer instead of me -, plus Matt Bell - an Australian guy from some obscure bands he likes to keep secret. Together we just churn out songs, and then I send them to the rest of the guys in Alestorm and say ‚play this‘. That’s how we’ve done the last couple of albums, and I’m pretty happy with it. The only main difference this time around is, I said ‚y-e-s!‘ to every riff, every song idea, even if it didn’t sound like Alestorm. That’s how we ended up with the Children Of Bodom inspired riffing in ‚Hyperion Omniriff‘, and the over-the-top extreme epicness of the final track.“

"Mega-Supreme Treasure Of The Eternal Thunderfist" … 17 minutes of pure great insanity, what led to such a monster? 


„Writing long songs is fun, and actually a lot easier than writing short songs. When you’re writing a 3-minute Pop-Metal anthem, you’ve got to time everything perfectly, got to make sure the extremely catchy chorus hits at the right time, so the casual fans don’t get bored. But if you’re writing a long song, you can already assume that only hardcore fans are gonna listen, so you can go a bit crazier, take longer making ideas unfold, and do lots of weird stuff. So the trick then is just to keep writing more and more riffs, and then find creative ways to join them together. Then at the end you bring back the chorus from the start of the song and suddenly, and b-a-n-g - you’ve got an epic. I think we’re gonna do more of this in the future, it’s really enjoyable to compose.“

And how well these highly lively - and partly exciting speedy - mammoth song knows how to entertain, kudos! Everything seems coherent and in its best place, I wouldn't have expected it to be so stringent, wonderful! How long did it take until it was completely composed? And arranged? And recorded? And, and, and? 


„It took less time than you think! 90 % of the song was written in a few weeks, I just struggled with joining everything together for the ending, and so I had to think about that for a month. We recorded the whole album in 3 weeks – only about 4 days of that was used on this song. We work fast! What took the longest was getting Russell Allen from Symphony X to take part in the song - he’s got my favorite voice of all time so it was such an honour that he agreed to be a part of this, during the epic prog-rock section in the middle of the song. The orchestral arrangements on this one are actually quite deceptively simple too – we’re very fortunate to have some great session musicians who work with us - Ally Storch from Subway To Sally on violin, Patty Gurdy of course on hurdy gurdy, and Tobias Hain & Helge Tischler on the trumpets and trombones. So when you’re surrounded by good people the music just happens so quickly.“

Absurd, funny, adventurous and epic tales, nothing for lousy landlubbers - please bring the readers a bit closer to the new lyrical content - let's pick "Killed To Death By Piracy, "Banana" and "Mega-Supreme Treasure Of The Eternal Thunderfist"!


„‚Killed to Death By Piracy‘ – basically that song title came into my head, and I knew I had to write a song around it. It’s basically a long list of all the ways you can die, and in the end saying that the best way to die is to be killed by pirates!



‚Banana‘ – this is the ‚fuck you, we don’t care, get drunk‘ song of the album! I got jealous of those Extreme Metal bands who can give their songs weird names that have nothing to do with the lyrics, so I thought i’d call this one ‚Banana‘. Eventually though I added a couple of lines about drinking Banana Daiquiri cocktails, so its not totally meaningless!



‚Mega Supreme Treasure Of The Eternal Thunderfist‘ – this song started as a kind of ‚depression song‘ with this really grim opening verse, then eventually it evolved into an epic tale of searching for a legendary treasure beneath the city of Bournemouth - which is first referenced in the song ‚Frozen Piss 2‘. There’s a bunch of mystic weirdness and some good old fashioned Epic Pirate Quest lyrics, and I genuinely think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.“

And the well-proven master Lammert is back at the knobs and with so much more! The sound is a blast, just fits perfectly to your new songs in every second, especially the drumming hit's the bull's eye beside all the great guitars - what would you do without this faithful producing comrade?

„I think we’d panic haha. I’m not sure any other producer would be able to deal with our sloppy amateur playing, how unprepared we are entering the studio, or the amount of post-production symphonic live orchestra bullshit nonsense we expect. He’s a great combo with us, and we expect to keep working with Lasse until he finally goes deaf!“

The current tour this year includes 18 stops, which gigs will be the most challenging for you? And, any funny anecdotes from the last tour that you want to refresh this time? 


„We’ve got to get from Pinkpop in the Netherlands, to Nummirock in northern Finland, in 12 hours – that’s gonna be a pain in the ass. Apart from that it’s going to be good fun and nice and relaxed. We’ve got a fantastic crew around us and they make everything easy. As for stories – you know, we’re really low on stories these days, we’re getting too old and sensible haha. The last insane thing that happened was when our drum tech Paul threw our sound engineer Fedge into a swamp in the middle of the USA. He ended up with an ear infection. Stay out of swamps, boys and girls.“

Anything you would like to add? 


„Oh yeah, I recently released a videogame for PC called ‚Pub Toilet Simulator 25‘ – it’s available now on Steam, get it!“

© Markus Eck, 19.05.2025

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