Sharon den Adel of Within Temptation had a chat with Ultimate Guitar about the band’s history as well as their latest album Hydra which is set to be released in Australia on 31st January!

UG: The music on “Hydra” sounds so much more organic. The sound is so much more rawer than on earlier albums. Has it matured in a certain way by letting go?

SdA: Well the case is more is the fact we let go of a certain way of songwriting how we used it in the past. Like in the past we had a certain idea about how we wanted to sound and what we were allowed to be within our genre. Nowadays we feel like with “The Heart of Everything” we felt like we finalized this symphonic kind of sound we were searching for all those years.

UG: If these boundaries you talk about hadn’t been placed on you back in the day, do you think you would have experimented more on those earlier albums?

SdA:I’m not sure if we were ready before that and I also don’t know if our fans were ready for it. You see that every record we have brought out, we have changed more or less. But I think the last two albums, the changes have been the biggest.With every change also, people had some difficulties. I do think our audiences are used to us changing constantly but I think we’re asking pretty much from them on the last two records. In the past it was also always based really on fear to change too much along the way.

UG: So you really did have a vision from the very earliest days of what you wanted Within Temptation to sound like?

SdA: Even then I think we had this sense of melancholy and darkness but in kind of a dreamy way. Very more doom metal than exactly what we’re now doing, which is more uptempo of course. But still we had the melancholy there and we still had the sometimes dreamy kind of psychedelic kind of songs but in a different way again.

UG: You had a really diverse palette.

SdA: When I was four years old, I got pocket money. I had a brother who was six years older and I was only allowed to spend my money on music because I was still a little baby and they didn’t want me to spend it on candy or toys. They said, “You’re gonna get that from us but now you’re only gonna get to spend your money on music.” So every Saturday I went with my mom and my brother to the record store and we bought several cassettes at the time.

UG: What did you buy?

SdA: I came home with Moody Blues and Jeff Wayne’s “The War of the Worlds” and those were the first tapes I ever when I was four years old. So that really was the basis for me for music. I knew a lot of music already from a very early age.

UG: How would you characterize the “Hydra” album?

SdA: With this album it was more like letting that go. A lot of bands were inspired by the ‘80s at the time we were writing “The Unforgiving” album. There was a lot of music based on the '80s coming out and it had a lot of '80s flavors. With this new album even though we’re only a few years further up the road, you can feel that music has changed again. Music is not inspired on the '80s but more like there are different influences in the music again. Music’s always organic and you feel things are changing comfortably.

Check out the rest of the interview at Underground Guitar