With high profile tours alongside the likes of Slipknot, Motorhead and Sepultura under their belts in the recent past In Flames' profile and popularity has arguably never been higher in the UK. Now on the release of their latest album, "A Sense Of Purpose", and a slot at this year's Download Festival to look forward to the band are looking at taking that next step here and pushing themselves up into the premier league of bands. John Consterdine caught up with guitarist Björn Gelotte to find out what's going on the world of In Flames

 “A Sense Of Purpose” is about to be unleashed, what can fans expect from the album both musically and lyrically? 

Björn: I’m not writing the lyrics our vocalist Anders [Fridén] is, but the main concept is about how people tend to do a lot of things, without actually thinking twice about what they do or why they are doing it. They are just doing it because they have always done it that way, running around without a sense of purpose. There is no reason for them to do stuff but they have done it always. The lyrics are also about small experiences that Anders had, that he’s seen other people have and the way he can relate to them. Basically that’s sort of the concept, each and every song is very different, it’s not a concept album per say. Musically it’s very guitar based, melodic, aggressive, up tempo, kick ass metal album basically. I’m extremely happy with the way it turned out and all the boy’s jobs on the album. It’s really fresh and I can’t wait to go out playing it.  

After hearing the promo of the album, it seems a lot more guitar driven and the choruses are quite melodic, it really seems like a progression from the last few albums. 

Björn: It sort of has to be for us. It’s always been extremely important to at least tread a little bit of new ground when you’re doing this because we’re not one of those bands who can do the same thing over and over again, we don’t feel comfortable with it. It’s like with everything we do, we want to explore a little bit of new ground, take another step in a slightly different direction and see what fits and what doesn’t fit and then learn from that and keep us on our toes.  

The album also has the longest In Flames song written, “The Chosen Pessimist”. [The song itself clocks in at over eight minutes long].

Björn: Yeah, it is quite a long one. It was actually one of the last songs we wrote for the album; there was a great need for something like this. It breathes some air into the rest of the album because it is really compact and really intense. Anders was the first one to bring it up and mention it, that we might need something else, but we didn’t want to do a ballad, we’ve done our sort of power ballad, we knew that we could do one and now we’ve done it. We wanted to do something else and it was interesting to work with something in this way that we did “The Chosen Pessimist”, as it’s more about the atmosphere, the sounds and the different parts of the song instead of a whole concept for the whole song, so it was really interesting working on that. 

Do you plan on performing the song live within the next year or so? 

Björn: Everything we write nowadays is planned to be played live but you never know, I mean it needs to fit into the live set and as we’ve mentioned we need at least another eight to ten minutes to perform it. It all depends on the set but it would be a great challenge and extremely interesting to do it live. 

The cover art of the new album seems to have split fans, some saying it’s not typical In Flames and others saying it matches the band’s progression. How would you respond to that? 

Björn: It’s exactly like with our music, we don’t wanna be the typical band, we don’t wanna be the guys who you can expect to do this and that. It’s basically for our own sake; we want to have something that is not typical death metal or black metal or typical metal at all. Anders once said it and he said it really good, it’s like something you’ll find in a case of vinyl records from the seventies, it’s really cool but at the same time really really modern. I also like it to have a lot of colours, it stands out compared to other CDs. Also it’s very easy for us to do a stage set around it or you know posters. Parts of it as whatever backgrounds, it’s easy to work around it, I really like it.  

Each album has shown more progression and given you more recognition; do you think that the new album will give you that extra push you’ve been looking for? 

Björn: It’s really hard to think in those terms, what we try and aim for is to make better and better songs that will suit our live set, making it better and better. I have the feeling that our live shows and our ability not to give up, to play so many places, so many shows in front of so many people. That’s what’s been the reason for us gaining a little bit more ground every record. The rest is basically luck and what’s hot or not you know, with live shows it’s not the same thing. Record labels need to do their part and promo departments blah blah blah, in the political and boring side of all this. Playing live is what it’s all about, and I’d like to think it’s the live shows that actually helped us gain more ground. 

That actually brings me onto my next point, do you think that the extensive touring you did for the last album [Come Clarity], including the tours with Slayer and Motorhead, and then your upcoming tour with Megadeth, has raised the profile of the band a lot more, especially in the UK? 

Björn: In the UK I would like to hope so because the first six years that we toured, we basically only did one show and it was always in London and we thought for a long time, that was the only place we could play as nobody was interested then we went on a tour with Slipknot where there was actually a lot of metal heads, then we did a few more shows on the European tour. Then we did the tour with Motorhead, which was rough at times because we went to some places where they really weren’t that interested in us, but that’s cool because we were there, we showed ourselves but know when we come back people are interested. So I’m definitely sure that this helped, but still I have no idea what our position in the UK is, I’d like to hope its well so we can come back and play there again as I love being in your guy’s pubs.  

Well I think the last headline tour you did here, with Sepultura supporting, I think that was mostly sold out, because of the other tours you’d done previously. 

Björn: It totally makes sense, that’s why we do the touring. Obviously you can’t make everybody happy, that’s not our goal, if we can get out there touring, that’s the only means we have. If there’s one person in this whole audience that actually likes us then that makes this whole journey worth it. Now if we can come back and do bigger and better shows we can bring more of our friends over, that’d be awesome.  

Most importantly, will you be hitting the UK sometime this year to do some touring?  

Björn: Most definitely yes, in what way I can’t really answer besides the Download festival.  

Are you looking forward to playing Download? 

Björn: Always. It’s been great; I think we’ve done it two times before. The UK has always been good but especially doing festivals, they are comparatively open minded because they are there for a bunch of different bands and that sort of makes it easier for bands like us who are a little bit heavier, extremer metal with a lot of catchy choruses and extreme melodies, but it’s a great way of reaching out to people you normally wouldn’t reach out to on a regular club show. After all the festivals we do Japan and Australia kinda quickly and then we embark on a European tour and that’s definitely going to include, I don’t know how many or where, but a bunch of shows in the UK. 

In your long career with In Flames, which album would you say has been your favourite to work on?

Björn: That’s a really hard question, that’s like choosing between my kids, (laughs) it doesn’t really work like that. But one of the ones that was most important for me was the first one I did [The Jester Race]. Obviously the latest record is always the best because it’s fresh still and it’s something that you weren’t able to do on the previous one and so forth. But the first album I ever did it sort of solidified the band and solidified the sound that we wanted to have, and then we started exploring from there. It was the first experience in a proper studio for me and it was a great experience. It was a lot of fun even though the whole recording and mix was done in about eleven days or something; it was great but short, like most things.  

Now, the band’s done a few interesting covers in the past like “Murders In The Rue Morgue” [Iron Maiden], “Eye Of The Beholder” [Metallica] etc. If you got the choice to cover any song by any band, what would it be? 

Björn: This time around we didn’t think about recording any cover songs because we recorded about sixteen songs for this one I think. I dunno, it needs to feel right and we need to convert it into an In Flames song basically, because we’re not going to do a straight up cover, that’s pointless you know. You want to incorporate it into your own sound, to try fool people that its your song, that’s part of the point for a cover, at least for us. But yeah it would be awesome; I’m a sucker for seventies metal or rock. I’d love to do a cover of “Gates Of Babylon” or something with Rainbow, but that might be hard, it’s kinda hard to fit that into the In Flames sound. 

That would be pretty interesting. 

Björn: Yeah, it would be very interesting, there’s a lot of great guitar work on that song and basically all the first Rainbow album is just amazing so it’d be a lot of fun for me at least, perhaps not as fun for Anders who has to sing it.  

I mean, with the Land Of Confusion [Genesis] cover you did, you managed to shave off at least a minute from the original recording. 

Björn: Well we had to; we felt there was a lot of stuff in there that wasn’t necessary for our version. Also you want to make it interesting and parts of that song aren’t interesting to even rearrange for us, so it was just interesting. It was a lot of fun to do though because that’s not the first song you would predict In Flames to do a cover of. We had a bunch of other covers on that session we recorded; I think we did a Kraftwerk song and something else, just for the heck of it to see if it fits. In the end it didn’t turn out very well, it didn’t do as good as we hoped so we sort of scrapped it. We’ve done other stuff, we’ve done Punk covers, we’ve done a lot of things, mostly because we can. 

Finally, if you could see any person or any band go up IN FLAMES, who would it be and why?

Björn: (Laughs) Oh I dunno, there’s really nobody I really dislike as to blow them up, not even musically (laughs). It’s an interesting thought; can I meditate on that until we meet the next time?  

Definitely. 

Björn: It’s a really good question. 

Well Bjorn, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you and hopefully we’ll catch up with you again towards the end of the year.

In Flames' New Album, A Sense Of Purpose, is released via Nuclear Blast on April 7th. You can check out the HRH review via this link and to find out more about the band you can visit the official website @ www.inflames.com