Esben Willems is a happy person. On the surface, such a comment, while true and important, should not get elevated to an opening sentence in a Monolord interview. Maybe that is because the parameters of the interview were well beyond those generally limited to music interviews.
One of the things our interview ended on was the idea of being a father. I asked Esben if the music he is making with Monolord is, subconsciously at least, some kind of legacy gift to his son, a powerful reminder of what his dad helped create with Monolord.
Esben took that question deeper by generalising his contribution as the drummer in the band. “I hope my son just realises that his father did what made him happy.”
From that, Esben followed “that modelling authentic self-expression is an important aspect of being a father.”
None of this should sound incongruous to the heavy soundscapes that Monolord has consistently created over the last ten years, because they are flush lyrics and musical cries with being an emotional and sentient being, living with a battling duality of hope and anxiety about the state of our world.
Monolord is not your typical Doom band, and this interview should permanently cement that notion.
In a 1970 BBC interview with Led Zeppelin, the interviewer tells John Bonham that he does not think he could whistle/hum of the band’s music. To be fair, the band’s heavy take on the blues was surely hard on the ears of music journalists who had been fed a steady diet of The Beatles, still the greatest band ever.
My opening question to Esben was about that–humming. Specifically, if he could guess what song from their 2021 Your Time To Shine album I have been humming consistently since then. To add to the “strangeness” of the opening question, I told him that I can’t even remember humming another song so consistently in the last 20 years.
Esben’s response: “I have no idea…”
So, as you would hope that I did, I started humming the song–the intro to I’ll Be Damned. It’s the guitar parts between the heavy riffs.
On the surface, this could feel like a self-indulgent, esoteric question.
But it wasn’t. It went, for both myself and Esben, to the very heart of why Monolord’s heaviness just hits harder and is so special.
Monolord and Melody
The use of it, and especially combined with melancholy and clever use of “faintness of sound”, has elevated Monolord to a level that their categorisation Stoner/Doom just doesn’t fit anymore, if it ever did to begin with.
So I asked Esben if this dedication to this melody is conscious or subconscious.
“That’s a really good question,” he said. “Tomas [Jäger] is responsible for the lyrics, but we all contribute. It’s like a Venn diagram, where the final sound is a combination of all our influences, with melody ending up as a consistent theme in our songs.”
Naturally, the discussion of the new album, specifically who produced it–Sylvia Massy, genius behind Tool’s 1993 Undertow–came up. I was intrigued as to how the album felt like the continuation of the musical growth of the previous albums and what Massy brought to the band.
“We have to credit producer Sylvia Massie’s mastery of a thousand small, invisible choices as the key to capturing the band’s vision during the recording process,” he said. “She created a comfortable, home-like environment, which helped the band perform at their best.
“Recording is generally emotionally and physically exhausting, so working with her was such an amazing experience. We were relaxed the very minute we walked into her studio.”
Understandably, Esben said in the interview, once the album is finished, the band does not listen to it. The phase of recording is finished, and while there is this emptiness, the band’s focus and energy shift to playing live, where the most powerful example of the band’s synergy is on display.
I commented to Esben that the band’s music is uplifting, even referring to it as romantic Doom. That brought a big smile to his face.
I then shared a quote from photographer Glen Friedman, who photographed so many of the amazing shots of The Z Boys skating in abandoned swimming pools in Santa Monica in the mid-’70s, on his definition of punk: “An intense obligation to the truth of your innermost self.”
“I like that,” Esben said. “I like that a lot.”
Surfing that affirming response, I told him that I see Monolord as a punk band, having found the truth of their innermost self and sharing that obligation with the intensity of their live performances. The Esben smile, which was a constant throughout the interview, might have been at its widest at this point.
It is at this point that I brought up having met Fredrik Nordin of Dozer at RippleFest in 2024, and how we spent most of the time talking about the future of the Earth and our kids.
You know how the interview ends. I started off with it. The warmth and humanity as a punctuation mark on our conversation did not temper the heaviness of Monolord.
It amplified it.
Monolord are currently in the midst of a U.S. tour following the release of their new album, Neverending. The band have partnered with Dunable Guitars for a pair of signature model instruments.
Monolord have been great friends of Dunable Guitars for almost a decade, using the brand’s guitars and basses as weapons of choice for their torrential downpour of heavy tones and catchy hooks live and in the studio.
Artist signature models for Thomas Jäger and Mika Hakki are long overdue, and Dunable is happy to finally present their Dunable USA Custom Gnarwhal and R2 Bass signature instruments, limited to only six of each model. For more details, visit dunableguitars.com/collections/in-stock-now.
Monolord released Neverending on 29 May 2026 via Relapse Records. Available as multiple limited-edition vinyl variants, CD and cassette, as well as digital, for more details visit relapse.com/pages/monolord-neverending.
