Krilloan started out as a studioproject back in 2020 in Älmhult, Sweden...
Krilloan started out as a studioproject back in 2020 in Älmhult, Sweden. Swedish guitarist Klas Holmgren decided that it was time to create some proper powermetalsongs, honoring the old traditions created by Blind Guardian and Helloween.
<< Said and done, the original plan was to write a song or two just for the fun of it and do it as a soloproject. However, when the first song was written I realized two things, I can´t sing at all and I´m not that good at playing fast metalsolos. I reached out to my oldtime friend Steve Brockmann (guitar) down in Germany and asked him if he was up for shredding on the song and he was. About the same time, I found out about Alex VanTrue (vocals) and he agreed to help me out, especially after he had heard my own horrible vocals on the demo I sent him. “I will do humanity a favour by not letting you sing this song” was his words after hearing my demo. >>
<< We put the song together and in April 2020 we released our first single “Yggdrasil” to the world. It got a good response, and we did some interviews to back it up. Later on that year we released the second single, “Moonblade” and after that one we got even better response so a plan started to form in my head, “maybe we can do something with this little project”. The idea for an EP came up we started to write some more songs. At the time I also realized that we needed a proper bass player and a drummer to make it a full band. Marco Ignacio Toba (bass) and David Lanas (drums) came in and suddenly we had five songs ready to be released to the world. Since I´m a sucker for artworks I reached out to Felipe Machado France who has done coverart for (among others) Blind Guardian and he came up with the amazing artwork for the EP that came to be named “Stories Of Times Forgotten”.>>
EP cover artwork by artist Felipe Machado
<< The plan was to make the EP as good as possible in all departments in order to make it stand out from the crows at this time we had five good song, a propainted artwork so we were only missing one thing, someone to take us over the finishline, that is, someone to mix the whole thing. I tock a chance and reached out to Lars Ramcke of the german power metal band Stormwarrior and he jumped on the opportunity, he was going to handle the mixing and then he got his friend Piet Sielck from Iron Savior to master it. The fun thing with the whole process was that one thing led to another and suddenly we had gone from a demo song with crappy vocals to a professional made EP in all departments. What do we do now? See if we can find someone who wants to release this thing of course! After some time we came into contact with Stormspell Records in USA and this amazing little record company (a one man operation) wanted to release or EP on CD, epic! We will always be grateful to Stormspell for taking the chance and fulfilling the dream of releasing a physical record.
It was released in May 2021 and we got a lot of good press both before and after its release. We seemed to have done something right with the songs because people from all over the world started to contact about the whole thing.
The idea with Krilloan has always been and will always be that “we shall play fast and hard powermetal without keyboardsolos” and people tended to like it. Apparently, we did good and we are very humble about all the fantastic response and we are very glad that people liked our little project.>>
<< After the release we started to think about what to do next, the project was to fun to let it die after the EP so what would be the next step? A full album of course. We started almost the day after “Stories…” came out to write the album that was going to be named “Emperor Rising”. >>
Album cover artwork by artist Alvaro Valverde
<< If we can do an EP, we can do a full-length album was the idea and almost a year after we were done. At that time Christoph Brandes had joined on drums instead of David Lanas. The reason for that was that Christoph was hired to handle the mix of the album in his Iguana Studios down in Germany. Christoph also happened to be a great drummer and he really liked the songs so said and done, he did both the drumming and the mixing making that part of the production really smooth.
We also got some cool guests on the album, Jack Reynold from UK:s finest band “Battle Born”, Johan Karlsson from the amazing Swedish band “Evermore” and of course a personal hero for me, Matthias Graf from the german band “Evertale”. We also got Alvaro Valverde to do the albumcover for us and he blew our minds out when he sent the finished artwork, once again we wanted to have a proper artwork that screamed metal and he delivered big time. >>
<< Around this time we had sent out the demo for the record to a bunch of bigger record labels and one day I had a email from Scarlet Records telling us that they were interested in writing a contract with us. Now, Scarlet is a very cool label down on Italy that has a bunch of great artists on their roster so we quickly decided to join forces with them. “How did we get here?” was a common question around this time. In around a year we had gone from just a small little project to a band that had released a EP, written a full length album and now we had a big record label in our ranks. Dreams can indeed come true.
“Emperor Rising” was released in December 2022 and once again, we got a LOT of great press.
Once again, we had done something right. The album is a nine songs smasher, clocking in at 37 minutes and going at full throttle from beginning to end. Filled with classic fast power metal tunes with songs based on classical fantasy themes.
At the moment we are writing album number two and we are closing in to the finish line. The plan is to release it somewhere next year. >>
***
With the official permission
of Klas Holmgren & Krilloan metal band
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