More than 20 years into their career, Irish metallers Primordial are riding the crest of their greatest successes yet. Their 2007 full-length, To the Nameless Dead was the best album of that year and brought them not only their highest sales, but also the opportunity to tour North America for the first time as one of the head acts on the PaganFest, effectively placing them in a leadership role of the pagan metal movement. And deservedly so. Rooted in black metal (Metal Blade has reissued their earlier albums for anyone wishing to explore their formative works), Primordial’s sound is folk metal without the silliness or the costuming. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of drama in Primordial, but it comes from the music itself and the performance of frontman Alan “Nemtheanga” Averill, not from the antlers strewn about the stage. As I recall from seeing them on that tour, a trenchcoat and an Irish flag on one of the several guitar stacks was about as far as they went.

On that level, some of the material on their latest offering, Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand (also Metal Blade) could be seen as “playing it up.” Indeed, even the title lends itself to being taken as a reference to the band’s relatively newfound success on American shores – the US being the “puritan” in question – after so long toiling in obscurity. And with several of the earlier tracks especially featuring direct address from Averill to his audience in the lyrics – “Rise my brothers/Rise from your graves/No grave is deep enough/To keep us in chains” from memorable opener “No Grave Deep Enough” – and “I’ve told you once/I’ve told you a thousand times/No regrets/No remorse” from “Bloodied Yet Unbowed,” which is perhaps Primordial’s most explicit exploration of their own circumstances to date, one might call Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand their most crowd-conscious work yet. In the chorus of “No Grave Deep Enough” comes a genuine folk metal progression, which isn’t something they’ve actually done before (they’ve always been more Bathory than Skyclad), however much they’ve been saddled with that genre designation in reviews. I won’t call it a capitulation, because I don’t believe a band goes 20-plus years doing whatever the fuck they want and then gets a taste of mainstream metal success and suddenly abandons the ethic that got them there, but Primordial are a smart enough act to know what works for them, and on Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand, that’s exactly what they’re playing to. In a way, it’s meeting expectation in the songwriting, but there’s no question that Primordial are still engaging their followers on their own terms.

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Dublin, Ireland‘s Primordial are nothing if they’re not hard to classify. The band, formed in 1987, could have been called black metal in their earliest work, but have long since transcended such easy genre-tagging. Because the lyrics of frontman Alan Averill come from a specifically Irish perspective and Ciáran MacUiliam (he and bassist Pól “Paul” MacAmlaigh are the remaining founding members of the band) has never been shy about incorporating Celtic influences, Primordial saw a major profile upgrade as part of the folk metal explosion in 2006-2008. In 2009, they toured the US for the first time as part of PaganFest.

Like many Americans, my first exposure to the band was 2005’s The Gathering Wilderness, which was their fifth album overall but first for Metal Blade Records, who also released To the Nameless Dead in 2007. By my judgment, To the Nameless Dead was the best album that came out that year, and though it would be two more years before I was able to catch the band live, I was still thrilled to do so. Likewise, now that Primordial have issued their first live DVD, All Empires Fall, I was equally excited to interview Alan Averill.

Averill is known for his opinions on a range of topics both music-related and not almost as much as his brash stage persona, and though All Empires Fall was the impetus for the conversation, there was more I wanted to get a sense of his feelings on social issues in his home country, where the Catholic church had at the time of our discussion just been in the news following more reports of sexual abuse by priests, and, by Averill‘s account, society has more or less collapsed.

To quote Marty DiBergi, “I got that. I got more. A lot more.” In the following Q&A, Alan Averill talks about the state of Ireland, his feelings on nationalism, economic hardships and rails against venues in the US for taking a percentage of merch sales from bands (which I’d never heard of before), through it all showing every ounce of the passion he carries with him into shows and onto albums.

Please enjoy the interview after the jump.

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