In late 2018, our friend Klay informed Jonas Z. (Tension) and me that he'll be moving to the other end of Germany soon. In the months prior, we had rehearsed together about a dozen times (maximum) and we thought that the songs we played should be documented in some form, so we decided to record them together with our friend Max (Glooven). Since the five songs we had rehearsed were more or less my first attempts at songwriting, they were kept simple and straight-forward. Therefore, if the songs weren't extraordinary in any way, we needed to think of something else that somehow set us apart from other bands.
In the end we decided to just muck around a bit. We didn't tell anybody about us recording - not even our closest friends - and we didn't want any information about the demo to be found anywhere. No information on where it's from, when it was recorded and who recorded it. At first we thought about making the tapes ourselves and just secretly sticking them into tape boxes of sellers for example at the KEEP IT TRUE festival, so someone would someday pull them out of there and think it's a demo from some forgotten Swedish jewel from 1982 (I think we got fairly close with the sound). However, we were so satisfied with the final product that we decided to at least send it to Dying Victims Productions (where Jonas is signed with his other band) and see what Florian (of DVP) thinks of it. Turned out, he liked it and decided to help us release it.

DVP released 500 tapes (which were designed by S. Castevet of Vulture, one of my very favourite bands - and I couldn't even tell him!) and they were sold out fairly quick. Friends of ours shared the demo on social media and asked us, if we had already heard about it. It was hard to keep a straight face at times... After a few months and long after Klay, Jonas and I had our last rehearsal together, Florian texted me, if we would like to be featured on a split vinyl with Venator from Austria - of course we did! More (mostly positive) reviews followed and in the end all the attention and positive feedback led to Klay and me deciding that we wanted to continue working together, despite him living a few hundred kilometres away by now. Jonas is busy with and wants to focus solely on Tension, so we decided to put Angel Blade to rest, change the band name and put together a new, full line-up for the first time. After all, Angel Blade was never meant to be more than some mysterious happening with one demo recording.

I really, really didn't think that this would be what comes of a three-song demo with songs about 1. headbanging, 2. heartbreak and 3. apocalypse, and bass lines recorded by a phenomenal singer, who nevertheless can barely play bass.

Anyway, I guess that's a good summary of what Angel Blade was and is about. We're looking forward to finally presenting these songs live for the first time in a few weeks time!

Until then, stay negative!
Luke L. (25th May 2021)