It's no secret that ARCH ENEMY love doing what they do, and they do it with pride. Metal is in their blood, flowing like a river. Since 2001's magnificent masterwork, "Wages Of Sin", the band have strived to diversify themselves even further, delving into new, sometimes experimental musical landscapes. Now they've reached another milestone in their evolution as one of the world's premier Metal bands with the release of their latest studio album, "Rise Of The Tyrant". Gripping, spellbinding, emotional, thought-invoking, crushing, "Rise Of The Tyrant" sees the resurgence of the old ARCH ENEMY mixed in with the sounds you'd expect on a great modern Metal album. Creating music for themselves first and foremost, and for the hordes of adoring fans across the globe, ARCH ENEMY hold the key to Metal's future. With enough brainstorming and determination, they'll have no problem seeing a lengthy career in the business. But as guitarist/songwriter Michael Amott tells METALEATER, he never thought the band would be going this long.

What do you like so much about the smaller Metal shops?

"Well, 'cause it's all Metal (laughs). It's all dedicated to the genre that I love. It's kind of getting rare, you know. I just like there being really accessible. That's just really good to know that there's that kind of hope for this."

Are there many of those in Sweden?

"Not really, no. There's a few, but not many. I grew up going to record stores, especially the independent Metal stores. It's something that I always thought was totally awesome. I remember when I was a kid in the '80s and you go in and they have like all the KREATOR and SODOM stuff on the walls... METALLICA picture discs and stuff like that. It was just like... (laughs)... you know - I'm from that generation so I grew up on that stuff so it's like, that really still gets me going, you know. I get excited. There's a different generation of Metal here (North America) now. So much stuff is called 'Metal' now. That term is getting thrown around so much, you know what I mean? I think there is some confusion in North America because Metal was gone for 10 years throughout the '90s pretty much, so there's some confusion as to what Metal really is... and in Europe it never went away. So it's very clear in people's minds what it is... and in Japan it's the same story. But here in America, I don't know... for some reason it went away and now everything is Metal again."

I agree with you. As a whole, the definition is still not known. People consider certain band's Metal...

"But it will be gone soon again and then everybody will be ashamed to call it Heavy Metal, but I'll still be in it probably (laughs)."

So let's talk about your new album "Rise Of The Tyrant". What inspired the title?

"We wrote a song that was musically probably the most extreme song that we'd written out of all the songs, and Angela (Gossow - vocals) brought in the lyrics and I just liked it. - I liked the title that she had for that. So that's actually stronger than any album title we've discussed. Maybe we should make this the title track 'cause it's kind of a special song the way that it's... the most extreme song. So it would be cool to have that as the title track. We were looking at all the other lyrics and there seemed to be sort of a theme going through some of them about different kinds of tyranny I guess... or just abuse of power and these kind of themes. 'Rise Of The Tyrant' - it sounds very Metal (laughs). It's not like something JUDAS PRIEST would put out (laughs)."

Where did you grab the first intro in the song?

"That's from a movie. That's actually Malcolm McDowell, the actor. He portrays Caligola in the early 80s - a controversial film for various reasons. It's about... he was kind of a megalomaniac and a tyrant, you know. But that was 2,000 years ago - a historical figure - but I thought it was cool to have something like that to sort of establish that feeling even more... the way he was completely out of his mind; power crazy. I think we still see that today in certain areas; not always in politics, of course... in the media moguls... like the big media powers that be... people who think they are above the law and that have a big influence on everybody's opinion... to control what people hear and see."

So that's basically the theme of the song?

"Yeah. It runs through a few of the songs."

What inspired the album cover? Did you have the vision or did you work with the artist?

"Yeah, I worked closely with this guy. I wanted the all-seeing eye in there and wanted something more than that because other bands have used that as well. There's all kinds of details in there. We wanted something very powerful and kind of terrifying and something that reflected the album title. Something that's sort of rising up - like the city in flames in the background."

It's very intricate.

"At the same time it is intricate, but we also wanted to have something that was kind of graphically very simple, like there's only three colours basically - black white and red, and some grey. It's very kind of monochrome. Simple, not like a million colors. The last album, 'Doomsday Machine', had almost more photo-realistic type colours, but we wanted something a little bit different with this one."

What made you decide to bring back Fredrik (Nordström) back instead of using Andy Sneap again?

"We wanted to record in Sweden. We wanted to do something a little bit different compared to what we had done on the previous two records. Going back to him seemed like it was doing something different but still kind of familiar. It was a way of doing something not exactly couple of records. It turned out pretty good."

With Chris (Amott - guitar) back in the band now, it seems like you have this resurgence.

"Yeah, in a way, yeah. That was kind of one part of the puzzle that was missing - the last tour was Chris not being there. Also you know... I just really made up my mind already back in 2005 when we started touring for 'Doomsday Machine'... I knew that the next album we would sort of go back to the more faster songs, more intricate arrangements, more guitar solos, more melody for the guitars, and also have a more gothic type of imagery on the next album. That's something that I knew, that I wanted, and I was kind of telling everybody that this is what we should do; try and convince everybody that that's what we should do. Basically this is what we ended up making with 'Rise Of The Tyrant'. Like with 'Wages Of Sin', I was kind of looking at that album... it was an album that was successful. I mean every album has been more and more successful but I mean successful from an artistic point of view, I feel that 'Wages Of Sin' was up there as one of the high points of our career. I looked at that album and I said 'What was it that made this album so cool and why do we still like to play those songs live?' I wasn't trying to make a copy of it but we were trying to make something that had a similar atmosphere."

It does have that, and it has that "old" ARCH ENEMY feel to it. Would you agree with that?

"Yeah, I think so. It's also got stuff related to what we've been doing in the past four years - the last two records 'Anthems Of Rebellion' and 'Doomsday Machine'. The stuff from those as well... we've learned a lot; we've developed as a band. This album is a lot more intricate maybe and more demanding than 'Wages Of Sin', but I know it has some of those key elements... some of the drama in the arrangements, like very emotional guitar work, stuff like that."

There is a lot of emotion in the guitar solos, I noticed that. It's almost spellbinding just listening to it.

"Well that's nice (laughs). That's what we're in to. I'm just a sucker for that. That's what I like. When a guitar solo comes in I want it to be taking the song to the next... to somewhere illustrating what is going on in the song lyrically or something. You just want to sort of take it to the next level, not just something that you throw in there to showoff a little technique that you picked up when you read Guitar World or something, you know. It's not about that for us. It's more of just an emotional thing, yeah... trying to have quality guitar parts as well. We kind of dig pretty deep when we look for influences with this kind of stuff. So it's not like... we don’t look to bands that are our peers. We're not influenced by that really. It's all the stuff we're into. That was always my thing, you know... try and bring quality melodic guitar parts into the Death/Thrash type environment. I've always loved those styles of music and try to blend it too. It's kind of a challenge, you know, because they're kind of opposites in a way. You take something big, ugly, heavy and distorted and then you've got something beautiful and sort of emotional - then try and blend the two. But the challenge is what makes it exciting. It creates tension in the music I think. I try to dig fairly deep into the history of Hard Rock and Metal and go see something on some obscure thing from the '70s and '80s and say 'That would be cool to have something like that.' If you look at what's going on right now then and you think 'Yeah, it would be cool to have a chuggy type breakdown part here ...' that would make it so boring. Then you've got another band on the bill playing these chuggy sort of breakdowns and telling the crowd to behave in a certain specific way for different parts - aerobics Metal or whatever they call it. It's just boring to me. I would just rather do something that's a little bit different. It's not us. We're not as accessible live as some other bands are, but we're very European in that sense. We're a European Metal band. I wouldn't say we're a Death Metal band either; I think we're like an extreme Metal band; extreme in the sense that we have all these different elements and it all comes together and it's not your every day stuff, I guess."

No, it's very unique.

"Well, we like to think so. We're trying (laughs)."

Your music amalgamates all kinds of subgenres of Metal.

"That's right, yeah."

Like you said, I wouldn't class you as a Death Metal band. Death Metal is CANNIBAL CORPSE. But a lot of people call you "Swedish melodic Death Metal" like DARK TRANQUILLITY. ARCH ENEMY is unique.

"I haven't really heard of that many people that have copied us... yet, whereas I have heard a lot bands copy IN FLAMES, and I've heard a lot of people copy AT THE GATES and stuff like that. I haven't heard that many people copy us; maybe it's because we're not that popular (laughs). But I think it's something to do with how we arrange our music. It's kind of hard to figure out what we're doing. It's not like we have a couple of pretty easy-to-learn ingredients, and then you just adapt that and you just sound like ARCH ENEMY. It's a bit more... it's in how everybody plays. It's in the details, you know."

Would you say that you have achieved everything you wanted to achieve with "Rise Of The Tyrant"?

"Musically. Yeah, you could always be better, you know. I mean, it's always a struggle. I'm never happy (laughs). We're trying to raise the bar every time but it gets harder and harder. The better you get, the better the albums get and the harder it is to top that next album. You just have to kind of do something a little bit different to keep it exciting. If you keep using the same thing it gets fairly boring pretty quickly. What I like about this album actually is that it's kind of exciting. We wanted to make something very sort of intricate, action-packed."

What's your favourite track?

"My favourite tracks are definitely not the singles. They never are. (Amott thinks about it for a few seconds) I like a lot of them, you know. 'In This Shallow Grave' - I like that one. I like 'The Day You Died' and 'The Great Darkness'. These are usually songs that come at the back of the album. I don't like the ones that are that immediate, I guess. I mean we have singles like 'Revolution Begins' and another one called 'I Will Live Again'. Both of those songs we did videos. But you know, I've always been an album person; I always go deeper into records and I find songs that are... I think even with our own stuff I'm a little bit like that... I always like the songs that never become videos or that are a bit longer maybe. I like the song 'The Day You Died' because it's kind of different for us. It's the first time we've attempted doing... there's a few things in the arrangements in that song that we've never done before."