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Imminence: “I was always determined that this is the thing I want to do. I put aside other options just to make the band work”
Still in the ascendancy following 2024’s stunning album The Black, Imminence have just announced their sixth album Axis Mundi. Faced with more expectation than ever before, the Swedes give K! the world-exclusive rundown on this expansive creative undertaking, their rise through the ranks, and why their gut-punch symphonic metalcore remains a quest in “trying to understand yourself better...”
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Press play on the video for Imminence’s The Sword That Never Bends and you’re confronted by two landscapes that feel straight out of Game Of Thrones. In one, the band occupy the foggy aftermath of a battlefield, dressed in magisterial black capes. The discomforting yellow heat of the other follows a knight, murdering and pillaging through a village, before meeting his match in a mage who wrings the soul out of his armour. ‘At this point they are making films with a soundtrack,’ reads one YouTube comment.
“What will be clear to people is that was only the first chapter,” smiles vocalist Eddie Berg, keeping tight-lipped on how the lead single of Imminence’s freshly-announced sixth album, Axis Mundi, introduces its narrative and lore.
“In itself, this video doesn't carry a bigger meaning or point,” adds guitarist Harald Barrett, “but together with the entire story that we're gonna present to you, that holds a grander message, and you have to watch the whole thing to really get a grip on it.”
“It's safe to say that you will see the knight again,” teases Eddie.
What we do know, however, is that the track is an absolute ripper of cutting-edge metalcore. From a menacing Mick Gordon-esque riff to the introduction of Eddie’s violin – Imminence’s signature move – in the bridge, it’s a worthy first successor to 2024's The Black, which solidified the Swedes as a force to be reckoned with. Today, combined with the one-two punch of singles False Light and Crestfallen, it’s time for their biggest swing yet. It's time for Axis Mundi.
From the outside, this feels like a pressure-cooker moment for Imminence. The Black completely changed the game for a band who, despite racking up sizeable streaming numbers for 2019 hits Infectious and Erase, never quite found the hype or recognition to take them around the world, with booking agents in the States rejecting them for years. Now, they’ve struck a deal with Sumerian (home of Bad Omens and Poppy) and will headline London’s O2 Academy Brixton next January, a significant jump from their last capital city headliner at the Roundhouse last year, and a quantum leap from the 600-capacity Garage they played before The Black was released.
Yet the band are meeting the weight of expectation head-on as they beckon this new era into life. Though they feel better prepared from a touring standpoint, the storm feels like it’s coming.
“You can never know what to expect going into a new cycle, because the process is unique,” explains Harald, who admittedly has a hard time taking in the “surreal” feeling of this album announcement. “But I think we’ve already noticed that this time, [the stakes are] so much bigger. It's so much more demanding than ever before – in a good way. All the years we've been touring and climbing the smallest steps on the ladder, there was no fast track to fame or success. But what we learned is to know ourselves and trust ourselves. We've been in countless unexpected situations before, [with] challenges, obstacles and problems, and we always managed to make it work.”
From losing founding drummer Peter Hanström in 2025 to paralysing writer’s block around 2019's Turn The Light On, the road to this point has been hard-won in the background.
“10 years ago, you and I were just lost, Eddie,” remembers Harald. ‘We couldn't write, get along or get into having a functional writing session together.”
“We were struggling really to find our identity as a band, what defines Imminence, and that's something really difficult to to find,” Eddie picks up. “We didn’t skip any step on the ladder, but when you were reaching a new step, there's no one to guide you, be it making really important decisions or how to navigate your career... Figuring that out for yourself is not easy.”
Harald laughs. “You have to guess your way forward, somehow…”
Although their music reeks of confidence and totality, these admissions capture the double-edged sword of where Imminence find themselves. The pair seem like sensitive, kindhearted souls, regularly using phrases like ‘the next level’ with caution and truth in equal measure, over cups of morning coffee at home. Harald swivels on his chair, perhaps the more pensive of the pair as he mulls over our questions. Eddie, meanwhile, is much more chilled and most likely to invite you on a dog walk; he owns seven rescues, some of whom come and say hello throughout our time together. It's quite the contrast between his countryside childhood root to standing on the edge of becoming a figurehead in modern metalcore.
But neither man is asking for sympathy as they try to traverse the trials and tribulations of success. Truly, this is everything Imminence ever dreamed of. They formed in Trelleborg back in 2009, a small town in southern Sweden where Eddie and Harald attended the same high school. The pair chuckle when we roll back the conversation to those days.
“How heavy music even found its way [to Trelleborg], it's extraordinary,” reflects Harald. “I remember how difficult it was to try to get people to play with me, to come down to the goddamn rehearsal, then they show up and don't even bring their instrument. Getting started was very difficult, but what I would find in Eddie, already, was this drive. ‘We're not going to leave until we've done what we said that we're going to do.’ We were pushing each other and the other guys who eventually joined the band to [stick with] it, and that was very rare.”
“I was always determined that this is the thing I want to do,” adds Eddie. “When we started Imminence, I felt this was something special, something I wanted to do with my life, so I always put aside other career options and worked part-time [in order to] make Imminence work.”
“It's never a been straight line, but it's about not giving up”
For 17 years, then, often with little reward, this unwavering drive has prevailed. How?
“It's never a straight line, but at the same time, it's [about] not giving up,” is Eddie’s response. “I think it comes from that genuine love of music, creating something out of nothing, and realising this band and our art together.”
“It gives you a bit of purpose and direction,” continues Harald. “Something that can take you further and into different places, more than anything else.”
At the centrepoint of their sound is Eddie’s violin. In Imminence, the traditionally classical instrument harnesses a much more singular kind of emotional depth, almost colouring in the space between the riffs and melodies instead of slapping another layer of grandeur on top. You can’t ignore it, but it’s not something that Imminence feel constrained by or tied to.
“The violin is a way for me to express myself emotionally in a way where maybe I can't with words,” explains Eddie. “It's quite easy to find the spots where it makes a lot of sense, and we don't really try to force that into parts where you don't think it belongs.”
“You cannot just apply it, and then all of a sudden, it sounds like Imminence,” agrees Harald. “It's always put in the right context. Of course, you think about, ‘Oh, is that our thing? Is that what we do that nobody else does? Is that what we should focus on?’ But you're not doing yourself a favour by thinking like that. You’ve always got to write for the songs. This is our little spice that we can add that makes the Imminence flavour, when we use it the right way.”
Service of the song is an ethos that crops up plenty of times. It’s reassuring to meet a band so steadfast in their beliefs, particularly in a sub-genre where toxic fanbases often berate bands for departing from a certain style. As they recently warned us about Axis Mundi, “It’s going to sound quite different to what people expect.” But with more eyes on the band than ever before, is it scary to contend with that idea?
“The creative process has to be judgement-free,” confirms Eddie. “If there's something we've learned through the years, it’s that trusting yourself and trusting your gut has gotten us to this point. Even though it feels maybe scary to do something new, I think it's really important to challenge yourself and go with your gut feeling of what is resonating with your soul.”
“Something that I wanted to achieve with the new album was simply, ‘How can we make the songwriting better?’” says Harald. “How can you write something that clicks, connects and moves you inside, instantly?’”
“If we both get really excited about something, that's the sign that we're on the right path,” elaborates Eddie. “Ultimately, you write songs that feel that they are great for you. It's not like, ‘Oh, the fans are gonna love this.’ It's all about making yourself feel something.”
Which brings us onto Axis Mundi. Literally translated from Latin as ‘the axis of the world,’ its mythological connotations concern the spiritual connection between earth and heaven. The ascension point, the portal to what lies beyond. Eddie recalls the moment he stumbled upon the physical embodiment of the Axis Mundi.
“When it comes to the first ideas and symbolism around the album, sometimes I like to do my own research. I was looking for something Swedish, and thinking about what we have in our culture. Midsummer and the Maypole, in its essence, is a symbol for the Axis Mundi.”
Much like a church spire or totem pole, the Maypole has been historically represented as a pillar of connection between earth and the supernatural.
“The lyrics are covering topics in terms of living with purpose, finding purpose, and it’s a moral dilemma, in many cases,” Harald adds. “Choosing who you want to be in between life and death. We were looking at that whole meaning and starting to look, ‘Can we find a narrative that explains what the lyrics are actually covering?’ And we did. In order to do so, we involved a scriptwriter [Juan Felipe Zuleta] to tell the whole story.”
Having self-produced much of their previous output, Axis Mundi marks the first time Imminence have truly brought other voices into the fold. Among them are composer Lukas Geppert and producer Drew Fulk, whose main role beyond production tweaks was “an affirmation that you guys are doing the right thing”, the band reflect in hindsight. While this extensive collaboration originated as a harmless exercise that they could always walk away from, it’s also the type of approach they’ve long been gunning for.
“Coming from a very independent background, you make do with what you have, whatever you can access,” Harald reflects. “Having a label on board now with all this manpower, you go, ‘Wow, the possibilities are now endless.’ It's all about, ‘How can we take this to the next level together?’ This was going to be a challenge because we’ve never operated on that level before, but I think we did a pretty good job with it.”
It’s certainly not a case of too many cooks, he reiterates. “We absolutely led the whole project.”
“The lyrics are about living with purpose, finding purpose, and choosing who you want to be in between life and death”
Comfortably, the sonic decisions on Axis Mundi are bolder than ever before. If Not Now, When and Shed Your Skin transport the band into the misty land of ’90s alt.rock, while Crestfallen flits between cinematic friction and a Spiritbox-y structure. Inspired by Bon Iver, Didn’t Think About You (Lately) moves from lo-fi to drum‘n’bass, and it provided the long-awaited context for Eddie to move on from someone or something in his life: ‘I hope you found some peace of mind’.
“I don’t know how to explain how that came to life,” he admits. “The lyrical content, I've been struggling to find the right way to put down for years. I always thought it was something really important for me to articulate, but I didn't know how to do it before, and in what context... it's a feeling that [I couldn’t] really let go of.”
Eddie shies away from materialising his lyrics, teeing up Axis Mundi only as a means to “follow a protagonist through this journey and see how the story develops. We don't want to give away too much, because we have a lot more to unravel. Axis Mundi [has a] central role in the story, and I think we're trying to manifest that into a visual universe.”
Why do you keep your cards so close to your chest?
“I like for people to figure out for themselves what it means to them. I am very personal in my lyrics, but I also don't like to put it in your face, because people have connected to our music through their own experience and emotions. I think that's important to keep that open-ended.”
Maybe that gives him protection and comfort. Both on a personal level, and in the context of Imminence’s increasing attention in this online diaspora, perhaps?
“It's a necessity for me to write about my feelings or what inspires me, and music has always been a comfort for me to express how I feel. Our music being so emotional, I think it is a necessity to bury yourself, in order to create something that we feel is real. I think there's a beautiful relief in expressing yourself, trying to understand yourself better and what you're going through.”
“We like to create context, something that people can dive into, and understand that there is more than what I'm only seeing on my screen here,” jumps in Harald. “There's a whole world behind this that I can be a part of, discover and lose myself in. I think that's creating a lot of excitement and ambition among our fans.”
“It's a necessity for me to write about what inspires me, and music has always been a comfort for me to express how I feel”
Indeed, the scope of Axis Mundi is only just starting to reveal itself. With the resources at their disposal, creating an all-encompassing world isn’t a trend that Imminence are jumping on, but something that they’ve always desired to maximise. With Sumerian in their corner, Axis Mundi could be their own gateway to heaven on earth, and the big leagues of heavy music.
Perhaps creating a multiverse of this scale was always intertwined with the band’s destiny.
“It's rooted in the essence of our music,” says Harald. “We've always been big fans of cinema [and] our music is dramatic at the core. It opens up a different level of theatricality. It sounds and feels cinematic, and I think that is really what makes it work. It takes you into that other world, and you start seeing things, building universes, and it feels like film, in that sense.”
“We've always been a very visual band and very ambitious, and as avid film fans, it felt natural to expand the visual universe further,” adds Eddie. “This time, we wanted to make it even more cohesive and thoughtful than ever before. We don't look at other bands and think we need to do something similar. This is a really important record for us that carries a lot of weight, and that should be reflected in the story and the world-building as well.”
For that reason, no matter what further success Axis Mundi will inevitably bring, the job is already done.
“Ultimately, you hope that people feel something [like] what you felt when you wrote these songs,” says Eddie. “They carry a lot of meaning for us, and in the end, that's all you can hope for – that it will resonate with someone else, and that they find some meaning, solace, or pure enjoyment from it.”
These closing remarks underline the band’s mantra, and the whole point of it, after all.
‘From Sweden, with love.’
Axis Mundi is released October 2 via Sumerian. Get your limited-edition splatter vinyl with hand-signed art card now.
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