As we kick 2024 out the door and welcome 2025 with open arms, join us for a series of interviews with artists who’ve braved the year’s riffs, breakdowns, and questionable soundchecks. We’re diving into their triumphs, challenges, and everything that kept the music industry alive and kicking. We sat down with the progressive metal act ROYAL SORROW to hear how they experienced 2024.
Hi there! Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. This is a short recap of 2024. So let’s start off with the obvious, how was 2024 for you?
Hello and thanks for having us! 2024 has been a very exciting year, first and foremost for marking the beginning of Royal Sorrow. We released our first song, “Metrograve,” in October and everything related to the launch has been really good, lots of positive feedback as well.
You were formerly known as EDGE OF HAZE, changed your name to ROYAL SORROW, and got signed to InsideOut Music. Why did you feel it was necessary to change your name? Did you just want a fresh start?
There were several reasons, but a fresh start was definitely the main thing. Signing to InsideOut had been a long-time dream come true and it felt like the perfect opportunity to analyze where we stood as a band. After all, we have been playing together since our teens and a lot of things have changed since the start of EDGE OF HAZE – both musically and personnel-wise. Rebranding ourselves felt like the best course of action.
New music and a record deal sound like great highlights to me but what were some of your favorite moments of 2024?
It was awesome to finish building our studio room in Helsinki, which has sort of become our HQ. Most of our writing and recording happens there. It’s truly been a game changer for our workflow, making recording so much smoother and more inspiring.
What can prog fans expect from your music? What are your main inspirations?
As prog fans ourselves, we have quite a wide range of influences. When finding our new identity as ROYAL SORROW we opted to explore a more modern sound than before, trying new techniques, lower tunings, and even bigger dynamic range than before. We’ve been compared to artists like VOLA, LEPROUS, and TESSERACT but as with each of them, respectively you can hear a lot of differences. We also like to include electronic and pop elements to our songs, going to more extremes than with EOH, but also keeping our signature sound in the focus, as at this point it feels like we’ve found it.
What does Royal Sorrow have planned for 2025?
Next year is shaping up to be amazing and full of new music. We’ll start right away in January with our next single and we have some of our first shows to announce soon. It will be very interesting to play new songs live for the first time. All-in-all, 2025 will be a very big year for us, so stay tuned! We wish all the readers a happy new year as well!
Interview by Laureline Tilkin
