Powerful vocals, dark, atmospheric, catchy, guitarbased melodic metal

It’s a common knowledge that Swedish music industry is famous for outstanding artists and music masterpieces. Metal On Loud Magazine team had a pleasure to talk to the talented metal musicians from the North of Europe, Tina and Stellan, the founders of Hexed.

Hello, friends! Thanks for your time with Metal On Loud Magazine! You are a comparatively new band at the Swedish metal scene, you started in 2015..
What challenges as a newcomer you have to meet? What difficulties and what privileges do exist for a new band in Sweden?

The challenge is to create a fanbase and to convince the listeners with our recently released songs that we are a hard working band that is here to stay. The hard part here can be exactly that we don’t have any history, old albums or shows to add for our promotion. We have to make ourselves a name among all the other great bands that are out there. But people hunger for new stuff, new sounds and that gives us good odds when we create the future for HEXED.

Tell us more about the band members, about your previous experience in music industry… What made you come together, choose these, not other musicians, to play in your band?

We are old friends that have been active as musicians for a long time but never as a band before. The idea of this constellation came up when we started writing songs together. The songs and the type of sound was suitable for the members skills and therefore they were chosen and asked to take place with us.

What is the story behind the name of the band? Why Hexed?

The main focus for the name HEXED is that we want people to somehow understand that its part female and that it´s Metal. And beside that we want to get our fans HEXED by our music.

How would you define your unique music style? If you had to characterize your sound in a few words, what would you say?

Powerful vocals, dark, atmospheric, catchy, guitarbased melodic metal. Haha, that wasn’t easy.

In spite of originality of your music…Time for confession, hehe! Tell us what artists influenced over you as of musicians? What are your music idols? What exactly of their inheritance do or will you use?

All of us have the same bands that we are highly influenced by and that is Queensrÿche, Crimson Glory and Fates Warning. Trademarks for those bands are their singers skills along with extremely talented musicians. Other bands that we get inspiration from is Lacuna Coil, Pagans Mind, Soilwork, Nightwish and many more.

Who is responsible for composing, for lyrics, for instrumental arrangements​ in the band? Tell our readers more about the process of writing songs, and what your songs are about.

Stellan writes all the music for HEXED, he also makes most of the instrumental arrangements. Tina writes the lyrics and melodies for almost all vocals. The process during the recordings has really been through life and death, some of our loved ones passed away too early. So naturally the songs are all about that and from the dark times you can get a lot of beautiful work done.

Your first album “Netherworld” is recorded and about to be released. What is the concept of the album, what is it about? Can we judge about the album by the single “Exhaling Life”? What songs listeners should pay special attention to and why?

The main purpose for the EP is to give the listeners the opportunity to get to know our sound. We thought that “Exhaling Life” would be a great single that could show what to expect from the album. The “Netherworld” concept are about Life itself. It has got metaphoric lyrics that contains near death experiences, astral projection, science, burdens of life etc. We want the listeners to be able to relate to different parts of life. The Album “Netherworld” is a result of Life and Death.

EP “Exhaling Life” received great feedback from metal critics…But if you, yourself, were a critic, what would you have done differently in EP, and even in the new album?

Since we had a long process through these sorrows, we had the time to make those changes. It is now as close to our imagination as it could be. We got the possibility to work with some amazing singers, Thomas Vikström (Therion) and Ronny Hemlin (Tad Morose). We also had our idea about the artwork for both the EP and Full-Length Album. Mattias Norén who has done cover-art for bands like Epica, Evergrey, Kamelot and many more, made a really awesome work with the HEXED covers.

Congratulations with the second video clip release! “Forsaken” is my favourite song of those by Hexed which I listened to…Do you have plans to make more video clips/lyrics videos in support of the album? Who chooses what songs should have an official video and how do you choose them, by what criteria?

Thanks a lot for that. Yes we are planning to make a video for the title track of the album and maybe for some other songs. Together we will choose which songs it will be, depending on the possibility to make a good video from the songs content.

What are your dreams? What would you like to achieve as a band? What kind of intermediate targets do you set for yourself as musicians on the way to your main goal/dream?

The dream is to keep producing and play music like this and our goal is to gig a lot and to meet up with our fans everywhere at our shows.

Where can we see you with live shows? Would you like to have a tour to support the new album, if yes – what countries would you like to visit, what festivals, what bands would you love to tour with?

So you mean we can choose free, haha? Hopefully you can see HEXED everywhere and right now we have gigs planned for the Swedish scenes. We would love to promote our album on a tour, maybe in Europe, South America and of course USA would be a dream. We would like to perform at festivals like: Sweden Rock Festival, Gefle Metal Festival, Sabaton Open Air, Femme Event, Metal over Malta, W.O.A, Progpower USA, to name a few! Some bands that would be awesome touring with are of course Queensrÿche, Delain, Lacuna Coil and Nightwish.

What would be your final words/wishes for readers of Metal On Loud Magazine?

Thank youm Tania and Metal On Loud Magazinem for featuring HEXED and having us on this interview. Thank you readers for taking your time reading and listening to HEXED, we are looking forward to meet each and everyone of you metalheads on our shows! Cheers!!

Thank you again, Tina and Stellan, for awesome music! We wish you great success! Much love from Metal On Loud Magazine team.

On behalf of the above mentioned,