In a recent interview with Heavy, Hammerfall frontman Joacim Cans was asked whether he does a lot of vocal warm-ups before performing on stage.
“I have my ritual,” he continued. “I’ve been doing the same things for 30 years now, and it works for me. So I would never change anything. Exactly one hour before the intro starts, I will go away for 10 minutes to find a room with a nice reverb, like a shower, in worst case, I have to go to a bathroom, but you have to do what you gotta do, you gotta do what you gotta do. So I’m starting up with my warmups.”
The frontman shared the rest of his routine. “And then when I’m done with that, I get dressed, I maybe have half a can of Coke and a half an hour, 20 minutes before the show, I go back into the warmup room. And then I am starting to test my high pitch and see if I woke that up by doing the lower parts before.”
He also revealed that he didn’t want to be a ‘shameful’ singer on stage. “I don’t wanna end up like many of my vocal heroes, that they can’t sing anymore, but they still go on tour. And it sounds — I can’t really find my words for it. It must be so shameful for them. They must feel so bad on stage, but they can’t quit because they don’t know anything else.”
The band has been labeled as power metal throughout their career. But as it appears, the frontman thinks they make heavy instead, and that heavy metal is ‘timeless.’ “Heavy metal music is timeless music. Heavy metal, to me, stands for quality. Not everything, of course, but the core — I would say the core of the metal bands. Then, of course, we had the hair metal movement that kind of killed the whole thing at the end of the ’80s,” he said during an interview.
“But I think heavy metal needed a little break to reinvent itself and kind of come back with the essence of what heavy metal music is. And then I think we kept it like that ever since the late ’90s. I mean, the ’80s was not even 10 years — it was not even a decade. The ’80s, which we’re talking about, that was only a couple of years. Then everything changed,” he added.
Hammerfall’s latest album, ‘Avenge The Fallen,’ was released on August 9 through Nuclear Blast Records. The band’s entire catalog with Nuclear Blast, from ‘Glory To The Brave’ to the 2014 album ‘(R)Evolution,’ was certified with a diamond award for over 1.5 million worldwide sales.
