Here’s a chance for you to tell our readers about your latest release, ‘The Altar of Sculpted Skulls’. But could you please start off by introducing the readers to Graveyard?

Javi (guitars): Hi, Graveyard is a Spanish Death Metal band that has been going since 2007. We have released one album, one MLP and several demos and split singles. We pay homage to Death Metal by playing it the classic way, the way of the great bands of the eighties and early nineties. We find ourselves much closer to bands like Bolt Thrower, Possessed, Demigod or Carnage than to the bands playing that modern kind of ultra-brutal-pig-squealing DM of nowadays. We are not the most skilled, technical or innovative of musicians but always try to be honest to ourselves and to the music we decided to play. Oh, and we also drink like there’s no tomorrow. That would be Graveyard in a few words.

And now onto ‘Graveyard’ - track-by-track! What inspired you, which topics are you dealing with, what do you want to express with the songs etc.

01. The Altar of Sculpted Skulls

This song deals with the different places mankind has attributed some kind of transcendental power to during the centuries. I saw one of these places in some ancient ruins in Mexico and there was the real altar of sculpted skulls called Tzompantli which was used for human sacrifices for hundreds of years. Whether there is something inherently special about a place like that or not is not important, it is the symbolic significance that matters, in my opinion.

02. An Epitaph Written in Blood

The lyrics for this song were written five minutes before I recorded the vocals, so there is not much to it. Just good old blasphemy in a short but intense song. The harmonized guitars at the beginning are one of my favourite moments in all of our songs.

03. Deathcrowned

Deathcrowned is about the tyranny of death, kind of our personal ‘Memento Mori’. We all will die, so our freedom is just freedom to choose when and how. Life is nothing but an illusion because we come from nothing and to nothing must return.

04. Cult of the Shadows

A short instrumental song that we have developed for our next album ‘The Sea Grave’. The name comes from the association of ideas that came to my mind when listening to the music. It is surely one of the darkest pieces of music we have ever put together.

05. Ritual

A really old song from our demo days completely reworked and re-recorded. We didn’t change too many things from the original version and just tried to do less mistakes and get a better and more accurate timing. The lyrics are about a ritual to raise the dead performed by a necromancer that goes wrong and ends up with him being ‘One of Them’.

06. Howl of the Black Death

Another old song, this time about the bubonic plague. I tried to give it a subtle touch of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ by Poe but probably failed. A really cool song to play live, though. It has been part of our live setlist for quite a long time.

Tell us a bit about the artwork – who made it etc. and how important do you feel it is to have a cool artwork?

The cover artwork was created by Matt Carr (Putrid Gore Art), who is one of the most talented artists out there and one of the coolest guys in the scene. It took only a couple of e-mails for him to get the concept and soon he came with that extremely cool picture of the darkest priest ever performing forgotten rites at the Altar of Sculpted Skulls. For us, good artwork is always a plus. Of course music is the most important part of the deal, but a cool piece of art will always support the music in a good way. It doesn’t work the opposite way, though, shitty music will remain crap even if the cover is the best ever.