Matias Kupiainen, Jens Johansson: Stratovarius new album push forward


Brave Words says:
STRATOVARIUS, who had planned to finish out 2010 working on a new record with a release set for February / March 2011. Instead, the band made the surprise move to release a new single in November 2010 featuring new tracks ‘Darkest Hours’ and ‘Infernal Maze’ in anticipation of a European tour supporting German metal veterans HELLOWEEN. At the same time the new album, Elysium, was pushed forward to hit the shelves in January 2011... “Most of the new stuff is actually composed by Matias,” he reveals. “There are two songs from Jens (Johansson / keyboards) and one from me. There’s one long song on the album, which is about 18 minutes divided into three different parts. We were thinking that they should be indexed separately, but it ended up on the album as just one long song.”

“I was pleasantly surprised,” Kotipelto says of Kupiainen. “He’s probably the best guitarist I’ve ever played live with. I don’t know what his problem is but he doesn’t make any mistakes (laughs). When he joined the band we weren’t tight as a group because we hadn’t played live together, but we did over 100 shows for Polaris. Those four or five months made us tighter and Matias is more relaxed because he knows what we’re expecting and what the fans expect.” more

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