Michael Poulsen didn’t set out to make Volbeat’s heaviest album to date. He just had nothing better to do.
“When we got the call that everything was canceled, I said, ‘You know what? I’m just going to sit down and make a new album,’” Poulsen tells me. “Then I thought, wait a minute—what did I just say?”
The result was Servant of the Mind, a record that sounds like it crawled out of a Scandinavian crypt with a Black Sabbath riff in one hand and a demonology textbook in the other. “Most of the stuff came out really heavy,” he says. “It felt like starting all over again.”
Volbeat—Denmark’s most successful metal export this side of Hamlet’s ghost—have always juggled styles, tossing metal, rockabilly, punk, and psychobilly into a blender and seeing what flies out. On Servant, they leaned into the dark. “I was doing all these podcasts talking about how I started in death metal,” Poulsen says. “Suddenly I was back in that headspace, writing stuff I hadn’t done in years. I think I scared the other guys.”
He also scared his house.
No, seriously. Poulsen casually drops the fact that every time he moves, something paranormal happens. “I’ve had spiritual experiences my whole life,” he shrugs. “Every new house, the first three months are a nightmare.” The most recent? A place previously owned by two guys who, according to Poulsen, “ruled the whole city,” owned every nightclub, and ended in a grisly murder that involved body parts and alleged dismemberment. Naturally.
“It got to the point where my fiancée said, ‘We have to call a medium.’ So we did. Two days of cleansing. The medium told me I bring spirits with me—and they fight with the ones already in the house.”
Okay.
Also, the medium casually informed him that when he was 13, the soul of a man who died in a car crash walked into Poulsen’s body. “I’ve been carrying him around ever since,” he says, like he’s talking about an old gym bag.
That might explain the lyrics, which mix witch burnings, soul possession, and spiritual limbo with the kind of melodic swagger usually reserved for Elvis impersonators on meth. “There’s a lot of light in there too,” Poulsen insists. “Positive energy. But yeah, ‘The Devil Rages On’—that one’s definitely present day.”
He also wrote the album in three months, which is the kind of thing most bands claim and almost none do. “I’d bring a new song to rehearsal every week,” he says. “The other guys were like, ‘What’s happening?’ I just told them: there’s nothing else to do.”
Volbeat even managed to knock out a couple covers before they left the studio: one of The Cramps’ “Domino” (originally by Roy Orbison, but darker, naturally), and a surprisingly slinky take on Metallica’s “Don’t Tread on Me” for The Metallica Blacklist tribute. “We said, let’s not pick a big hit. Let’s find something we can put our swing on,” Poulsen says. “I went back to the hotel, worked it out in a couple hours. It’s not Metallica’s version. It’s ours.”
For a guy who once fronted a death metal band and now writes arena-ready rock songs about witch trials, Poulsen is oddly grounded. Or maybe just used to being haunted. “I’m not saying the darkness is a good thing,” he says. “But if it inspires something honest? I’ll use it.”
So what’s next? Volbeat hits the road with Ghost—yes, the Swedish occult rock band whose lead singer dresses like a satanic pope—and Poulsen is already plotting how to swap in new tracks from night to night. “We want to play the whole record eventually,” he says. “But we’ll do it bit by bit. Every show, a different handful.”
That’s assuming the spirits let him leave the house.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
