Portrait is a Swedish heavy metal band. They were one of the first bands that took on a more traditional heavy metal sound in the early 2000's. Taking inspiration from bands like Judas Priest, RAM, Mercyful Fate and Candlemass. I have talked with drummer Anders Persson and guitarist Christian Lindell of Portrait.
We can start with a brief introduction of the band.
Anders Persson:
We are the band Portrait we started out in 2006 and released a demo tape called Welcome To My Funeral. Before that we had other bands who had been playing since the late 90s, maybe '98 or '99 and it took a couple of years before we started up Portrait and then, like I said, we did a demo tape.
Christian Lindell:
We did Into the Nothingness, a single version, before we released our first album in 2007. Yeah and before we started the band we had different other bands going, mostly in the black/thrash metal style but we we felt that our hearts were with heavy metal, but we never thought it was possible to start such a band because it was so hard to find anyone who could sing heavy metal in a decent or good way and then we discovered that our common friend Philip could actually sing and we just went for it, basically. We wrote some songs and then just decided to, yeah, to play traditional heavy metal with some darkness added to it, so we ended up with "heavy metal darkness".
Anders Persson & Christian Lindell
What are your main influences?
Christian Lindell:
If we start out with bands we like, it's mostly the traditional heavy metal like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath for example.
Anders Persson:
- Dio, Motörhead. Slayer. - Dissection, Candlemass for example, to name a few of them. And when we started rehearsing with Portrait, when we started the band, we did some covers of Running Wild.
Christian Lindell:
Yeah we played the song Black Demon. I can remember that we did that as a start and that was around the same time when we wrote the first song Black Hole of Doom also. So those two: Black Hole of Doom and Black Demon I remember we rehearsed at the very first rehearsals. When we started out we wanted to do dark heavy metal in the vein of Mercyful Fate, early Running Wild and Stormwitch and Iron Maiden and so on. So that is what we started up with.
How would you define traditional metal?
Christian Lindell:
Well, out relation to the term 'traditional metal' is not really. We're not too familiar with the term but when we started out we tried to do similar things as the classic bands that loved, like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Dio and so on. Mercyful Fate and that was the main inspiration but with time we wanted something of our own. What inspires us to develop and evolve as a band and to develop our own sound and our own style. That has been the most important thing over these fifteen years.
Even though we have explored a lot of areas I still think that many people regard us as traditional metal, whatever that term means. But it's not a term that we use to define our own band or any other bands really. We do what we feel is right for us and then it is up to others to decide if they want to label us as traditional heavy metal or not.
What's your opinions on the 'New wave of traditional heavy metal'?
Anders Persson:
When we first started playing live we didn't know that there was a wave of new of old heavy metal in our genre. We just liked heavy metal music. We started to play gigs and after a while there was a festival in Sweden called Muskelrock (Musclerock) and a lot of bands started their career there. For example all the Swedish bands played there after just releasing a demo tape or after releasing their first albums. We didn't know that there was a wave So I'm not sure if we are part of the wave. We just play the music that we like.
Christian Lindell:
Later we discovered that there were others doing old school metal. More or less in our age group and that there was some festivals in Germany and France with the focus on old school heavy metal. We never really felt as we were part of some form of wave but on the other hand we have seen it mentioned of course in the metal media and so on.
When it comes to the New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal I think that a lot of bands that started out around the same time has developed in a good way, and that is the most important thing. That whatever you start up as can grow into something of it's own. Like an own entity that has it's own character and uniqueness. We can see that in all so called waves that has been going on in metal. Ever since the 80's with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal that had some bands that released one good single and you also had Maiden that has done 16 or 17 great albums by now. The same thing with the death metal and thhe blaack metal booms in the late eighties and early nineties. There were a lot of bands that formed at the same time, some of them kept going and developed their own style and they went in different directions and so. While others just released maybe one good album and then decided to put it to rest.
I thiink it becomes interesting when you can see this will to develop your own sound and style. That is the most important thing. If it's part of some wave or not that is not really interesting to me.
Anders Persson:
It's the same for the black metal bands I think. It expands the genre and makes it larger. Bands that played small shows now play big arenas so I think it has grown as well, with the bands. The whole scene not just the bands itself.
Burn the World (2017)
What was your reaction when you first discovered a traditional sounding Heavy Metal band?
Anders Persson:
In the 2000s we discovered bands like Ram and Wolf, they were old-school metal but new bands, so it was not something old but they played music that sound like in the 80s.
Christian Lindell:
Yeah I remember when first I met the guys from Ram at Sweden Rock Festival and I think it was 2001, I think, and I was given this promo CD with two or three songs and I was totally blown away by it, we listened to it at camping grounds and the song Judgement and Punishment really got me going mad there, I had not heard a new band sounding in the vein of like Judas Priest and all the other godly bands.
So I was a very happy 16 year old boy meeting a band like that, so they have definitely been both good friends since then and a source of inspiration also, but I think also that around that time at the year 2000 when Bruce Dickinson got back with Iron Maiden and Halford released Resurrection I guess heavy metal became mainstream again on some level at least, and I guess that opened up for bands like us as well, because people understood then that heavy metal did not belong to the past but it has been an ever ongoing force.
Also during the 90s but the only thing is that it was not mainstream during the 90s, but the bands still kept going on, like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest and Dio, Motörhead, Grave Digger, Running Wild, Exciter, all those great bands still kept doing their thing in the 90s but things came up more to the surface after the year 2000, and I think that might have opened some road for us because there was some form of audience for us as well when we came with our shit a couple of years later you know, so yeah.
At One With None (2021)
Why did you guys choose to play traditional heavy metal?
Anders Persson:
We didn't choose to play traditional heavy metal. It has always been there, the best genre of metal I think. But if you can't find any singer or vocalist that are good at singing heavy metal. Then it's hard to start a band. When we discovered that Philip could sing we just went for it and tried to do the best of it. That lineup didn't last very long but now we have Per instead and he is a great singer so we can continue this heavy metal music.
Christian Lindell:
We can also say that we started playing more extreme forms of metal but we were always mainly inspired by the old heavy metal bands. Maybe what we do now is the other way around. We play heavy metal but we are also inspired by more extreme forms of music, like death and black metal stuff. That we have also added into our music in one way or another. Just like how we added influences of prog rock and whatever that we enjoy listening to. So whan we started out heavy metal wasn't really. On the mainstream scene it was something that belonged to the past but once we started out and we found our singer and we realized that we could play and write songs in that style we became very inspired to continue with that. Because we felt like we had something to add and that everything about Heavy Metal wasn't done yet so we felt like we had something to add to it's legacy and to help develop the genre as a whole.
Anders Persson:
We feel like there is no limits for Portrait. If we feel like trying out things outside the traditional metal. There is nothing that stops us. We can actually do what we want and if that's not good for the audience...
Christian Lindell:
It's good for us anyway. There is very little that I feel like we cannot do. That's why I think we two doesn't have any side projects. Everything can be done within the realm of Portrait.
By/Ruthless
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