We’ve just found a forward-thinking progressive metal band from Denmark: Cold Night For Alligators was founded in 2008. Since then they had a few lineup changes – the drummer of the band, Nikolaj introduced themselves and the band’s future plans.

“Our guitarists, Roar and Kristoffer, have been playing together since they were in 5th or 6th grade and founded the band together with the previous drummer.

Our bass player Christian, and singer, Johan played together in a previous band which broke up. Christian then joined CNFA and a few months later the previous singer of CNFA left, so Christian sort of brought Johan in. This happened around the same time when the first album, ‘Course of Events’ was recorded, so he was put under a lot of pressure from the start and really delivered, obviously.

I’m actually the most recent addition. I lived in another part of Denmark until two years ago but had known Roar and Kristoffer a bit for many years, as the Danish scene is quite small, and I used to play in a band in sort of the same genre. Two and a half years ago I was moving to Copenhagen, where the band is based, and by chance talked to Kristoffer, who told me that they were looking for a new drummer.

I had no band at the time and honestly wasn’t even sure if I was going to continue playing drums, but I jumped at the chance to play a few trial shows with the band.

These went great, and since then we’ve basically focused on writing our upcoming album ‘Fervor’, which is the reason I’m speaking to you now!

In terms of bands and musicians, this is tough to answer, as we differ a lot in our musical tastes.

Our influences include proggy stuff, more straight up metal, electronic music, pop, fusion and classical, though of course, the metal and prog elements come through most clearly in the actual music we produce. I’d like to think the other influence provide some cool nuances though. We have created a couple of Spotify playlists on our band page with various artists we enjoy if anyone is up for a cool, eclectic listening experience.

I’m mostly a metalhead, but my preferences vary a lot. Right now I’m really into Ghost, Leprous, Psycroptic, and The Pineapple Thief.

In terms of other influences, when we wrote this album, we did try very consciously to be more conceptual about the feeling we want to convey and the journey the listener should go through. In general, we wanted a more complete work of art that was a bit more serious on all levels, but we have our own individual ways of conceptualizing this.

For example, the lyrics are very important for our singer to convey properly, so he was very focused on the way these worked on the overall record, as well as how the visuals match everything. Before we found the actual cover artist, we did actually work with some other visual artists to try and visualize the themes of the record, which helped a lot though we didn’t use the artwork.

Personally, I had a very specific vision of wanting the album overall to feel like a Michael Mann movie. I had a desire to recreate the sort of melancholy feeling that I get from a movie like ‘Heat’, which I can definitely feel it in the final product, though I’m not sure if it will make sense to anyone else.

We actually already released our first album, ‘Course of Events’, in 2016. This was sort of a limited release, but our upcoming second album ‘Fervor’ is our first time releasing through Long Branch/SPV, which we’re really excited about!

We knew from the start that this album would be softer and quite dark compared to the first record. This was of course partly because our musical influences changed, but we spent a lot of time discussing themes that we wanted the record to reflect. We felt that we can still make it pretty technical and proggy, but at the same time give the songs more room to breathe and for example showcase our singer a bit more. We also made a conscious decision to choose synths which stand out a bit more. There’s is a lot of synth on the first record, but this time we wanted them to be more electronic sounding, instead of using a lot of strings for example, as we felt this makes a bit more of a statement and makes it more personal.

So expect it to be proggy, experimental and dark. There is some upbeat, positive stuff on it though, so it’s not too one-dimensional. We just released the first single ‘Canaille’, which is an example of that, as it’s the most straightforward stuff we’ve ever done. We wanted some variation so the mood didn’t become monotonous. We’re releasing the second single on October 12th, which is completely different from the first one and should give people an idea of the breadth of the record.

This record was very collaborative. Although there’s usually one person who is sort of the main writer on a song, each section and song has been gone over collaboratively by the whole band and discussed.

We wanted to make a conscious effort to really work on the structure of the songs, rather than just stringing riffs together. So even when the songs go in a weird direction, it has a purpose for us.

When producing the record we also took a collaborative approach. We had Ole from the Danish pop act Dúne produce the electronics, on which he did an amazing job. We also asked our friend Andreas from the band Cabal to do guest vocals on one track and brought in cello player Laura Torp Westh on another track. Finally, our manager Mirza produced the vocals and sang a lot of backup stuff on it. He’s in a band called Siamese, is an amazing singer and has a great ear for vocal melodies and layers, so he really beefed up the vocal parts.

This year we actually only have one concert planned, which is our release concert in Copenhagen on November 17th. But we’re working on a lot of live shows for 2019. Unfortunately, it’s too early to reveal anything, but I will say that if everything works out we will see a lot of Europe and hopefully also cross some water.

If people follow our social media they will know as soon as we can make anything public.”