This interview has been published on Radio Metal the 17/06/2019.

“Tomorrow, my career may be ruined. Can you imagine that?”: the day before the Requiem performance at this year’s edition of the Roadburn Festival, metal legend Tom G. Warrior was tense, and understandably so. The expectations were high, to say the least: a unique event, the concert was to be the grand outcome of a project he started thirty-three years ago when Celtic Frost was at its heights. Entitled Requiem, the piece, composed of “Rex Irae”, from 1987’s infamous Into The Pandemonium, “Winter”, the closer of 2006’s Monotheist, and a central part composed for the occasion, had never been played live before. The performance promised to be historical, involving Warrior’s band Triptykon and an orchestra, the Metropole Orkest,  and without a safety net.

This interview took place the following day, just a few hours after the Requiem was completed and hailed by a packed venue. Still in the heat of the moment, Tom went back on the genesis of this long-term undertaking. Majestic, rife with emotion, a musical marriage of heaven and hell, the Requiem is more than a music piece. It’s a distillation of a more than three-decades-long career that forged contemporary metal and a chiaroscuro take on death. Literally, on the death of several of Tom’s colleagues and friends, including Celtic Frost’s Martin Ain. And figuratively, on death as the inexhaustible muse, always tightly weaved into Warrior’s creative process: the Requiem is creation and destruction, life and death made one. We also talked about his numerous other projects: the Requiem might have been taken to an end, but Tom G. Warrior still has a lot to offer…

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