Interview By Alison Booth

Oriental metal trailblazers ORPHANED LAND released their critically acclaimed new album, “Unsung Prophets & Dead Messiahs” at the end of January and have been supporting it with an intensive touring schedule since February. The band have already performed for fans in Europe, Russia and Japan and are set to tour the USA with Faroese metallers TYR in May.

Metal Shock Finland Senior Manager Alison Booth caught up with guitarist Chen Balbus before they departed for the Russian leg of the “Unsung Prophets & Dead Messiahs” tour. The album and touring was discussed as well as an update on Chen‘s rock ‘n’ roll band THE SECRET SAINTS. Check out some excerpts below, with the full chat on the audio player:

Discussing how the album has been received, Chen stated:

“So far I’m quite proud with the reception of the audience – they loved it when we just released the first single and the second single and the third single. I did not expect that – I thought that people kinda won’t accept it ‘cos they liked the previous members and they were not trusting me and the other guys to bring something that is authentic Orphaned Land. And we pretty much succeeded to do our job and we brought if not the best Orphaned Land album.

So, people love it. People sing it in shows already, I’m proud.”

On the subject of ORPHANED LAND breaking boundaries of racial and religious divide, Chen explained:

“Yeah, pretty much every time we go in concerts we’re asking ‘alright, we’re Orphaned Land from Israel, are there any Muslims, Arabic people in the crowd? Lift your flags, tell us where you’re from’. You just see like, people coming from countries that are pretty much our neighbour countries like Lebanon, Syria, Egypt. All of those countries are like an hour drive from where I live and I can never actually visit there, but I see those guys in other countries. 

So it’s something that our politicians and all those ambassadors could never achieve with all that money they got there and all those fancy talks at the UN and we just did it with goddamn heavy metal! ”

On what’s coming up for the band after the summer, Chen revealed:

“We’re gonna plan the next leg of the European tour, maybe do some new locations, pretty much working on it right now. We’re already actually writing the new album as we speak. We don’t wanna let people wait five years again, so we better start. There are a couple of tracks here and there, like snippets, but we’ll get to there eventually – first we gotta rock the world!”

Due to adverse weather conditions today, ORPHANED LAND‘s official album release show at the Shuni Fortress in Israel has now been rescheduled to 13th June. Check out more information on the band’s official Facebook page.

Blackdiamond’s Metal Mayhem radio show aired an ORPHANED LAND special this week with the interview and lots of music – if you missed out it will soon be available to listen to again at this location.

Tokyo 2018

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