SOILWORK TRIVIA
Trivia
The first tour Soilwork ever did as, in the singer's own phrase, real professionals was in Japan. Writing the first instalment of his column for the Japanese magazine Gekirock, Björn "Speed" Strid recalled not believing the phone call that told him a Japanese tour was confirmed: playing Japan, he had assumed, was something that happened to bands like Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe or Yngwie Malmsteen — bands who played the Budokan. He was simply floored by that first visit, he wrote, and took to the country immediately.
Soilwork did not start out as Soilwork. According to the product page from Ward Records, who issue the band in Japan, they come from Helsingborg, a port city in south-western Sweden, and began in 1995 under the name Inferior Breed, changing it to Soilwork the following year. The line-up took shape around Björn "Speed" Strid on vocals and Peter Wichers on guitar, and the debut album Steelbath Suicide followed in 1998.
The drummer's replacement was chosen on the recommendation of the man leaving. Ward Records' page records that in 2016 the Belgian drummer Dirk Verbeuren, who had been the foundation of the band's sound since Stabbing the Drama, left to join Megadeth — and that Soilwork sent him off gladly and then took his own advice on a successor. The name he put forward was Bastian Thusgaard, a young Danish drummer who had studied under him.
Peter Wichers, one of the two men the band formed around, left it twice. Ward Records' page dates the first departure to just after Stabbing the Drama in 2005; the album that followed, Sworn to a Great Divide in 2007, was made with a guitar pair of Ola Frenning and Daniel Antonsson. Wichers came back in 2008, and The Panic Broadcast in 2010 was recorded with him and the French guitarist Sylvain Coudret. Then, in 2012, he left again — this time to concentrate on the producing and engineering career he had begun after moving to the United States.
The man who replaced Peter Wichers had already stood in for the band live several times: David Andersson. Ward Records' page records that the album this line-up made in 2013, The Living Infinite, was their ninth — and the first double album of the band's career. Rather than scaling back after losing a founder, in other words, they scaled up.
Björn "Speed" Strid became a singer by accident. In his column for Gekirock he explained that Peter — Wichers, who was putting a band together — asked him to sing without knowing who he was or what he did. All Peter had gone on was how he looked: long black hair, a leather jacket with a death metal logo on it, tight jeans. Strid's answer was that he played guitar and had never sung, but that he would give it a go. He has been the band's voice for close to thirty years since.
Björn "Speed" Strid has never taken a vocal lesson. Asked in a 2007 interview with Gekirock how his singing had improved, that was his answer: no lessons at all. What he credited instead was the experience gained on the road behind Stabbing the Drama, and the amount you can learn simply from standing on a stage and performing. The technique of moving between a growl and a clean melody inside one song was, on his account, acquired that way.
The guitarist David Andersson died in September 2022. In the account Blabbermouth carried in 2026, Björn "Speed" Strid described him as very much a driving force in the writing, and said that since then the writing in Soilwork has become much more of a group effort. Strid spoke of the band entering a new era, and credited Simon Johansson — for a long time their touring guitarist, now a full member — with bringing fresh blood both personally and in the songwriting.
The Japanese editions come with a commentary booklet and translated lyrics. Ward Records give the Japanese release of the eleventh album, Verkligheten, as 11 January 2019 under the number GQCS-90671 at 2,750 yen including tax, with a Japanese-language essay and a lyric translation enclosed. The twelfth album, Övergivenheten, followed on 19 August 2022 as GQCS-91223 at 2,860 yen, in the same form. Verkligheten also had a limited run of a hundred sets with a hand-signed card and a t-shirt, and Övergivenheten a separate edition with a signed card.
They became regular visitors to Japan comparatively early. Ward Records' page describes the run of albums from The Chainheart Machine through to Figure Number Five as a period in which the band released steadily and also began coming to Japan often, building their standing both on the records and on a live show the label calls exceptional. Within a few years of the debut, in other words, Japan had become one of the countries they came back to.
Björn "Speed" Strid had a column of his own in a Japanese music magazine. It ran in Gekirock as Soilwork Bjorn's Stabbing The Column, from the first instalment in the July 2008 issue to a twenty-sixth in January 2013. In the first one he gave the reason he feels a particular connection to Japan — his wife is Japanese — and wrote that he had by then been to the country perhaps ten times, with the band and with her, which had taught him more of it than touring alone would.
The 2019 Japanese tour was cancelled and then happened anyway, in the same year. Gekirock reported that the Soilwork Japan Tour 2019, booked for 18 to 20 March in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, was called off along with the rest of the Asian dates for reasons on the band's side, announced by the promoter Evoken de Valhall Production in December 2018. Some two months later, in February 2019, a tour of the same name was announced afresh for 4 November in Osaka, the 5th in Nagoya and the 6th in Tokyo, with Rise To Fall from Spain and Blood Stain Child from Japan supporting.
The shape people recognise — a clean-sung chorus inside a death metal song — arrived with the third album. Ward Records' page describes A Predator's Portrait as the record on which Soilwork brought in a great deal of heavy rock and on which Björn began to sing clean melodies as well as deliver death metal shouts, calling the combination a form the band completed there. From that point, the page says, their music grew more varied with each album.
Two Soilwork albums were made without a bass player in the band. Ward Records' page records that Ola Flink, the bassist who had been there since before Steelbath Suicide, left in 2015, and that The Ride Majestic was recorded with the two guitarists covering the bass parts between them. The same thing happened on Verkligheten in 2019, with Sylvain Coudret doubling up. In between, Markus Wibom played bass on tour.
Björn and David Andersson had another band together besides Soilwork. Ward Records' page notes that Björn's work on clean vocals also comes through in the side project The Night Flight Orchestra, and that Thomas Johansson, who produced Verkligheten, shared guitar duties with David in a traditional-metal-minded band called Mean Streak. In an account Blabbermouth carried, Björn described The Night Flight Orchestra as a real vocal challenge and said it taught him a great deal about his own voice.
The twelfth album, Övergivenheten, was recorded across a year in three sessions. The album text on the band's own site gives the studio as Nordic Sound Lab in Skara, Sweden and the producer as Thomas "Plec" Johansson, who had also produced the two previous records, and says the writing and recording were spread over three sessions between January and December 2021. There was no hurry to finish, which the same page presents as the point: it left the band room to reflect on their music and to savour the making of the record.
In recent years Soilwork have taken their album titles straight from Swedish. The band's own site glosses Övergivenheten as The Abandonment, and treats that as the theme of the record: being surrounded by the thought of being abandoned, or of abandoning others. The eleventh album before it, Verkligheten, is likewise a Swedish word — reality — as Ward Records' Japanese notes explain.
What the band were after on Övergivenheten was a sound as organic as they could make it. Acoustic elements were worked into the songs to that end, the band's own site explains, with the aim of giving the listener the feeling of standing in the middle of the band's creative environment as it happened. Building that, the same page notes, required a balance that the circumstances of the time made difficult.
Bassist Rasmus Ehrnborn was announced as a full member around Övergivenheten. He had, the band's own site notes, already been recording with them since the EP A Whisp Of The Atlantic. The same page sets out the line-up at that point: David Andersson, Björn and drummer Bastian Thusgaard, completed by the long-serving keyboard player Sven Karlsson and guitarist Sylvain Coudret.
Soilwork put out their first two albums on the French label Listenable Records. Blabbermouth records Steel Bath Suicide and The Chainheart Machine appearing there before the band joined the Nuclear Blast roster in 2001, and Ward Records' Japanese notes identify the third album, A Predator's Portrait, as their first for the German label. Every studio album since has come out on it.
The vocals on Sworn to a Great Divide were handled by Devin Townsend, back after five years. In a 2007 interview with Gekirock, Björn "Speed" Strid said he had wanted to work with Townsend on vocals again ever since they made Natural Born Chaos together, but that Townsend's schedule had not allowed it on the two albums in between; this time it finally did. Everything other than the vocals was recorded at a local studio, Not Quite Studio, and the album was co-produced with Klas and Peter of Darkane.
The band bought equipment so that they could make albums themselves. In the 2007 Gekirock interview, Björn "Speed" Strid said that during Sworn to a Great Divide they had acquired a good deal of gear with future self-production in mind, and that one result was a bigger, heavier sound with more of a live, dirty feel than before. The intention took years to arrive: the album they were preparing as of 2026 is reported to be essentially self-produced.
Their first tour was a van across Europe in midwinter. In his column for Gekirock, Björn "Speed" Strid described Soilwork's first outing as a European run with the Brazilian death metal band Krisiun in December 1998, and it was, he wrote, extremely cold. Some of the venues were distinctly odd. One show was at a French restaurant whose owner had booked them under the impression that they were a Brazilian samba band. Another took place in somebody's living room.
Before music, Björn "Speed" Strid played ice hockey. In his Gekirock column he described hockey as the thing he cared most about until he gave it up at sixteen or seventeen: his dream had been to turn professional in the NHL, and he was doing well enough that qualifying for Sweden's junior national league was not far off. He also noted that one of his team-mates from those days went on to win the Stanley Cup with the Detroit Red Wings.
In the summer of 2011, Björn "Speed" Strid took a job in a factory. Writing the seventeenth instalment of his Gekirock column, he explained that he had gone to work at a company in his home town in Sweden, run by a friend of his, refining edible oils. It was the first ordinary job he had held since 2003 — music had been the whole of it until then — and his weeks now ran factory on weekdays, stage at weekends. He described it as getting the best of both worlds.
Soilwork have an EP whose title track runs sixteen minutes. Blabbermouth notes that the band's release before Övergivenheten was the EP A Whisp Of The Atlantic, built around a sixteen-minute title piece. It is also the record on which bassist Rasmus Ehrnborn began playing with them. A band filed under melodic death metal, in other words, used an EP to go long.
Through the 2000s Soilwork were releasing almost annually and touring hard. Among the highlights of that stretch, Blabbermouth lists an Ozzfest with Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden headlining, and an arena tour with Lamb Of God and Killswitch Engage. The territories named are North America, Europe, Australia and Japan.
The first pressing of Verkligheten came with an extra EP inside it. Blabbermouth reports that the first-edition digipack and the vinyl versions of the band's eleventh album carried an exclusive four-song EP called Underworld: Summerburned And Winterblown, In This Master's Tale, The Undying Eye, and the original version of Needles And Kin, a song that appears on the album proper in another form. It was also the first Soilwork album with Bastian Thusgaard on drums.
Verkligheten carries three guest vocalists. In the track listing Blabbermouth published, Alissa White-Gluz appears on Stålfågel, Tomi Joutsen on Needles And Kin and Dave Sheldon on You Aquiver. Ward Records' Japanese notes name Joutsen, of Amorphis, on the same song. Stålfågel is Swedish for steel bird.
The Ride Majestic was shaped by every member of the band losing someone close while the album was being made. In the account Songfacts carries, Björn "Speed" Strid told Billboard that the record was largely inspired by what had happened in their personal lives that year, and that the lyrics deal with the meaning of existence and with coming to terms with the fact that everything ends. Of the title track he said it concerns the fear of dying and the art of staying sane while alive, and that it is also a tribute to the people they had lost.
A Swedish-language track from a 2002 album was reissued digitally twenty-one years later. Gekirock reported that Soilwork released Kvicksilver as a digital single in December 2023 — a song that had been a bonus track on Natural Born Chaos, and that is a Swedish arrangement of that album's Mercury Shadow. Kvicksilver is the Swedish word for quicksilver, which is to say the English title carried straight across.
The single Spirit Of No Return, released in October 2024, was the first song made after Simon Johansson formally joined. Gekirock presented it as a turning point in the band's development, and quoted Björn "Speed" Strid describing it as a fierce reminder of the past that is at the same time the opening of a new Soilwork era. In the fuller account Blabbermouth carries, he describes taking the thrashier early days and dressing them in a heavier suit, with lyrics about the urge to belong and fit in and how that can end badly when you abandon who you actually are.
The next album is being made largely by the band alone. Blabbermouth reported in 2026 that, after working with a series of producers over the years, Soilwork intend to self-produce this one and to record it at Simon Johansson's studio. Björn "Speed" Strid described the aim as bringing back the heaviness of A Predator's Portrait and Natural Born Chaos, with something of Stabbing The Drama, and mixing it with the epic atmosphere of their recent work. Johansson said they already have more than an album's worth of songs written — but that it will not be a double album.
In 2016 Soilwork put out a collection of rarities and unreleased material. Blabbermouth records Death Resonance as a Nuclear Blast release. The same year saw bassist Markus Wibom leave, late in 2016, because of other commitments; the band carried on as a quintet with Taylor Nordberg of The Absence playing bass on the road. A record assembled from the past, in a year when the present line-up was moving.