We sat down to chat to the wonderful Ben of Feuerschwanz the other day about their upcoming album, Knightclub, their first time playing in the UK and their upcoming tour with Lord of the Lost. Check it all out below!

The new album, Knightclub, is out next month, right? It feels like it’s got a bit more of a party vibe to it than your previous work?

We’re in July now so yes, next month!

We’ve always been a band with lots of party vibes. We’ve made a few albums, two or three, which are a bit more… not that much partying. Fegefeuer and the last album have quite a few depressive songs. That’s because of the pandemic. I’m quite a jolly person and like to party and have a good time, but the pandemic was a real downer. We’re in the aftermath now and I can see it in my music that the songs which I wrote then and which came out a year or two later are not that happy. They usually are so that’s the reason we came back to our normal sound. It’s how we are!

The title track was written for Eurovision, right?

It was not written for Eurovision, we had it before the application. We wrote the song last summer and the application was December or something. We absolutely did not have Eurovision in our minds when we wrote it. I’ve tried it before, to write a song like that. You have to come to this idea at some part of your life as a band to ask yourself like ‘oh, we could try Eurovision. We need a poppy, catchy Eurovision tune with this and that and…’. And I tried this and it was shit! Complete nonsense and it was bad. I can’t do it so I just wrote a party song about knights, about things I love, and it turned out to be a quite decent Eurovision song! That’s how it should be; it’s authentic.

I imagine a lot of the album was written before you’d even gotten to the Eurovision stage, then?

Yes, every song! Way before it!

I have to admit I’ve become a little obsessed with your Gangnam Style cover.

A lot of people hate it! I can understand, it’s crazy. Some people can’t stand it! It’s like we put worlds together which don’t really belong together, which is why we were also having great fun and feeling… when we did this and shot the video we were saying to ourselves ‘are we fucking crazy? Are we doing it?’. But that’s why we did it, we wanted to do something really crazy. To make the least appropriate song for a folk metal band!

It works really well! People may be annoyed because it was massive and everywhere when it first came out, maybe brought people’s minds back to that instead!

Yeah, lots of flashbacks! And maybe some people have bad flashbacks to 2012, so I can fully understand that. But I can only say that it’s a great song, and as a songwriter I must confess it’s a great song, I liked it 13 years ago. It hits different and doesn’t follow any strict rules. The riff is crazy and nonsense but still catchy, so it’s really cool!

You’ve managed to work with so many amazing artists over your time, most recently Doro. How did that come about?

The start of the song, ‘Valhalla’, was actually when we covered Manowar, ‘Warriors of the World’. I think the only thing… I love the song, I love Manowar, that’s why we covered it a few years ago… but the only thing missing from a 2025 point of view is that it’s only “Brothers Everywhere”. I know that sounds a bit icky and stuff and I’m not the wokeness police or anything, but it feels off to exclude 50% of the population in a song, why only the brothers? I know it’s about warfare and soldiers and stuff, but we make music, not war. So when I’m up there singing it, it always feels like ‘yeah and the sisters too’ but it doesn’t fit into the song! So we wanted to make our own song, our own ‘Warriors of the World’, explicitly for the brothers and the sisters. We called it ‘for the Vikings and the Valkyries’ as it sounds cooler.

That was the beginning of the song and it has this hard rock/classic metal vibe. We thought about different guest musicians and stuff but we always came back to Doro. She is the mother of all metal, she’s a very brave woman and had the balls to sing in an 80s metal band. That’s so cool! She paved the way for many women today, including Schildmaid from our band. That’s why she was the one and only best choice to participate in this song. Also, she has quite a low voice for a woman, which was cool as for other female artists the song would be to low, it wouldn’t fit that well musically. Doro could really nail the same melody that I did! It fit really awesome, still sounding very different to us, and she has endless attitude which is so cool to hear!

It looks like you’ve got quite a big festival season planned, including Bloodstock, right? Have you done the festival before?

No no no, Bloodstock will be our first show in the UK. We’ve never made it over the Channel. We’ve played in Spain and in Miami but not in the UK. It’s time to change that! It’ll be our first run with British metal fans, and I’m really excited to be honest! It’ll be a really cool experience.

The cool thing is our music works… we played in France last week and the crazy thing about the French is they don’t speak German, but they don’t speak English as well either. We sing in German and no one understands one word, and we try to communicate in English between songs and we don’t speak perfect fluent English and the people in the crowd don’t understand what we are trying to tell them. We come down to a non-verbal communication because you want to understand and make a party and have fun but you can’t express it very exactly. That’s why you’re always like ‘scream!’ and ‘yeah!’. That’s what matters most in the music, energy and the emotion, not the exact words. It’s about energy and emotion. That’s why I like playing in foreign countries, they’re more like ‘let’s go for the party’.

I think it’s quite wholesome to see that metal music can connect people on such a deep level. On festivals you can spend the whole evening without understanding one word, it is possible! Through music you can understand each other without knowing the words.

Have you got much planned for the end of the year?

Yes, we have a tour booked with our friends from Lord of the Lost. We announced quite a few big shows in Germany together with them, and they’re releasing their album as well in July or August. So there will be quite a cool synergy effect. We really like each other and made the song ‘Lords of Fyre’ together last year. But our music is quite different, which is cool. Like same same but different. They are somehow a metal band but not that classic. We come from the medieval side into metal, they come from the gothic side. We meet somewhere; heavy metal, hard rock, wherever. It’s quite cool because it’s special.

Is there any chance of Lord of the Lost coming on to of ‘Lords of Fyre’ on the tour with you?

Oh of course, we will play it! We don’t know exactly how to do it because it will be like 14 people on stage, but we will just stack onto each other or something! We will play it and have a good time, maybe for the last song or something!