We had the pleasure of chatting to Dr Dead himself of the amazing Dominum about their upcoming album, touring plans and plenty of zombie talk! Check it out below!

How did you come up with the whole zombie concept of the band?

So I was doing a production with Visions of Atlantis, and I had the glasses of a pirate on and having the mindset of a pirate. I drove home as a pirate and sat at home like a pirate. I was watching The Walking Dead and thought, ‘there’s pirate bands and Viking bands, why the hell is there no zombie bands!’ Or at least zombie power metal bands. So that was where the idea was born to do that kind of thing!

What’s the kind of writing process like for you? Is it mainly you bringing stuff to the band or are they involved a lot too?

Mainly the songwriting is done in my studio, and ideas from all sides are warmly welcome! For example on this record the song ‘Killed by Life’ is a song by Tommy, our guitar player. We’ve done a lot of collaborations with other songwriters too, like Ben from Feuerschwanz, he was involved in two songs. Whenever something matches, whenever you feel like a collaboration could be a cool thing to do, it mostly is a cool thing. When two people come together and have a vibe, it’s worth so much, and it always gets better if you have someone who you have a good relation with!

How would you compare this upcoming album with your first?

The first record was mainly written in COVID so we couldn’t try out too much because we were trapped inside. Now we’ve played over 60 shows, which is insane to say out loud. But a show is not one direction. When you play a show for people it’s in both directions, we get stuff back from the fans. It’s like being in therapy. You go to therapy and he or she asks one question and then you talk for 50/60 minutes, like playing a show, and in the end you know better who you are.

So after playing 60 shows, I think the new album is more mature, maybe a bit less polished. You could say Hey Living People is like Dominum in primary school, and now we’re going to college!

For the pre-order of the album, you’ve got a recording of the Graspop set. What made you pick that one?

Graspop is a very special festival, it’s so huge and there were over 60,000 people. We couldn’t see the horizon, there were people everywhere. This was one of the shows where everything was right; the interaction with the audience was perfect, we played kinda well, the mood was good. After the show we found out someone recorded it and sent us the tracks. We were able to remix them so everything fell into place, which was a very cool thing! We asked for permission of course and the Graspop people were so cool with it so we thought it might be a nice thing for the fans to have an extra portion of live Dominum in their CD player!

We’ve got the Scorpions cover on this new album, are you wanting to continue with a couple of covers moving forward?

Covers are always a nice way to get to better know yourself. The song is already composed. ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane’ is 40 years old now, it was kind of a birthday song that we wanted to give to the Scorpions. A birthday present that they probably never heard. But the song was written already and we didn’t put too much thought on the composition because it was there so we could just think how can we do it that’s Dominum-style. This is also something that you just have to think of, because what makes Dominum Dominum? When you have a song like this that you can fool around with you can try a lot of things and get to know yourself better in the process.

You seem to be touring almost constantly recently, right?

It seems it, yes! I’m having this feeling as well!

Will this upcoming tour be your first time in the UK?

No, we played one show in February this year with Petyon Parrish, we played O2 Shepherds Bush in London. That was a really cool show! We played ‘Dead or Alive’ there and all you British people just went nuts for the song. That was the first tour date of that tour, so that was special. But yes, our second time in the UK!

Do you have a dream tour lineup you’d want to be part of?

A dream lineup that came to mind straight away would be maybe Ghost, Slipknot and Dominum.

That’s be cool, a very theatrical show!

Absolutely! Theatric, crazy and wild.

And you’ve just finished shooting a music video, is it out in time for the album?

Yes, the very new one is gonna be out on the 27th.

Does it continue the theme of zombifying more people?

You’d think that, but this time to be honest it’s special. You’ve got the formula already; Dr Dead comes in with his people and someone gets zombified and then everyone’s happy in the end. This video’s a bit different. In this video we also had a very nice guest and Dr Dead obviously wanted her to join but she wasn’t too into being a zombie so she got away. Maybe there was also more emotions involved. Dr Dead maybe… you will see, but this is another dimension of emotional involvement from Dr Dead that’s maybe never been seen before. It’s going to be a big different! We thought now we’ve zombiefied a few people, now we’ve got Jesus, we need something else!

Are you building more of a semi-continuous story with it all, then?

Yeah, of course! But it’s maybe not as a concept band. So if you want to dive into the story you can, but you don’t have to to get the music and get the songs. It’s just another layer that you can get!

And given that you’ve now converted Jesus, what instrument do you imagine he’s bring to the band?

That’s a very good question! For sure it would be a guitar in the shape of a cross!

I feel like we’ve somehow not seen that before, that would be cool!

It would be cool! I think maybe people are scared of going to hell, but we’re from there anyway so we can do it!