At the end of January, the thrash metallers who strode confidently onto the scene in 2006, when Domen Hudrap founded a band and named it Thraw, made themselves heard again after a long silence. After a studio break of a few years (which didn’t mean they stopped creating), they made up for it with a new heavy-hitting single and a video to go with it, carrying a very telling title: Century of enslavement.
Right from the start, Thraw shot to the very top of the thrash metal scene of the time, and in their best years they shared the stage with the likes of Helloween, Blind Guardian, Opeth, Morbid Angel, Tankard and plenty of others. Their debut full-length album Decoding the past, released in 2013, was produced by the renowned American producer Juan Urteaga (Exodus, Machine Head, Testament), and it also earned Thraw international recognition.
In 2021, when the band marked fifteen years of existence, Domen and Tilen Hudrap (guitar and bass) and Ožbej Paternuš (guitar) were joined on drums by longtime friend of the band Lenart Mlinar. After the release of the new single, the older of the Hudrap brothers, Tilen, told us more about how it came together and what the future holds. For anyone who has no problem paying attention but whose memory sometimes plays tricks on them, he also pointed out some important milestones from the past.
Whenever Thraw came up, you always stressed that the band hasn’t said its last word, it’s just on hold.
That’s right. I’ve always stressed that Thraw hasn’t said its last word, it’s simply in a state of hibernation, and the only reason it ended up there was my international career, because of which I haven’t spent more than two months in Slovenia in the last nine or ten years. That’s why we haven’t played live and haven’t had time for the studio.
Still, we never stopped creating. A huge amount of material piled up: riffs, lyrics, concepts and potential titles. We’ve actually had a title for the next album ever since Decoding the past came out in 2013.
But none of that matters these days. What matters is that you put something out. Be it a single, an EP, a video, whatever. The times aren’t kind to full-length albums, because the attention span of today’s listener, especially a younger one, doesn’t stretch beyond a millisecond. There’s no point making albums with ten or twelve tracks, since sooner or later people stop listening at track three. Singles make a lot more sense, because people actually listen to them in full, maybe even more than once.
Okay, I’ve stretched my answer a bit there, but yes, Thraw is the only thrash metal band in Slovenia’s history, apart from Eruption and Lintver, that has never stopped operating, not even for a single month. Never!
Did the second year of corona chaos give you the right nudge to start creating again?
Like I said, the creating never stopped. The corona chaos just nudged us in the direction of finally finding the time. Time to get together, talk things through and settle on a concept. The other guys are really busy too. My brother has been a professional producer for a long time, working in the studio 15 hours a day on a hundred projects, and he’s lived solely off that for seven years now. Lenart and Ožbej both have regular jobs and don’t have time every day either. As a full-fledged professional musician I do have time, since music is all I do, but if we want to get something done, we all need to be there.
During the corona chaos we found the time to get into the studio for the intro and to actually record the material. There’s enough of it for at least six albums, so yeah… Thraw lives on.
How did the new single come about? Did it already have its outline earlier, or was it born in these strange times?
It took shape a long time ago. I wrote the song, both the lyrics and fifty percent of the music, seven or eight years ago, and the second part during corona. So the lyrics of Century of enslavement and the first half of the track, up to the middle killer riff, have been written for years and years, and I finished the second half in the months from September to December. Actually, it’s the first Thraw song in history that wasn’t written by my brother and is solely my work.
The lyrics are very… explicit, socially critical. They might even point to the role of the people who help create such a society. So are we hard-working innocents who got misled and played, or did we blindly chase the state of ‘being nice’ and enslave ourselves?
The lyrics are in my typical style when I write for Thraw. All the fans who’ve followed the band over the last ten years know that our lyrics mostly deal with socio-psychological and socio-historical themes. Take our last studio release Gunshot treatment and Decoding the past. On the latter, I’d point especially to Factual perspective, which I wrote myself, and to Smode’s lyrics, such as Pandemic reflection and Insanity is Unquestionable.
Coming back to my writing in Thraw… I always try to teach and open new horizons and eyes for the people who listen to the lyrics, and that’s extremely important. So, totally in the spirit of our times. Art imitates life. In a way, we write about what we see, what’s happening, and what needs to change. Those who’ve read Doomsday Code, Factual perspective, and also my older lyrics for Wartune from fifteen years ago, like Future projection, Sights of remorse, Identified progression, know my writing style, and that’s exactly why it’s all the more effective.
And no, we’re not hard-working innocents who got played. The thing is, people simply adapt to something they think will make their lives better. So in a way they’re not ignorant, they’re just trying to find the easiest path through life, or the path that will lead them to some partial financial freedom, which is wrong in itself, but most people, sadly, have no other choice. They have to submit to something and mostly do something that doesn’t make them as happy as it should, just to survive.
As for self-enslavement… all of that is more in the mind. If you let your thoughts enslave you, you’re toast. If the system enslaves you anyway, at least don’t let your own thoughts do it.
With the band’s fifteenth anniversary, there was also a change in the lineup. What kind of change?
Yes, for the fifteenth anniversary we were joined by Lenart Mlinar, a lifelong friend. My brother and I have known him for literally more than 30 years. We grew up together, our parents even grew up together, and our heavy metal lives have run in parallel since we were kids, 10 or 11 years old.
Lenart and I have been playing together for more than 25 years. We first played together in the Youth Wind Orchestra of the Ravne Music School and later in the adult Ravne Ironworkers’ Wind Orchestra, and Lenart is connected to all of us through heavy metal too, since, like the other guitarist Ožbej, he was a member of my first band, which was called Železo. His arrival is totally logical, because he’s the best drummer, and not just in Koroška. He definitely ranks among the top 3 metal drummers in Slovenia.
We were able to follow at least part of the video shoot on social media. Apparently it took place in a very cold atmosphere?
I’ve always wanted to shoot something connected to heavy metal in our old ironworks, which has been the bread and butter of generations in Koroška for 400 years. I first made that wish come true five years ago, while shooting the first documentary about the birth of heavy metal in Slovenia, Železne stopinje, when we filmed one segment at the entrance to the ironworks. Of course, as one of the biggest ironworks in the former Yugoslavia it has always been famous, but Železne stopinje immortalized it in connection with heavy metal.
This time we shot the video in the museum part of the ironworks, called Štauharija, which houses a permanent exhibition on the journey of iron, metal and steel in Koroška. That’s our history, and that’s exactly why I wanted to shoot the video here. Luckily, the entire staff, the director included, was ready to cooperate. They actually said it was a great honor for them to take part, which made us really happy too.
Yeah, during the shoot it was -1 degree, which doesn’t sound very cold, but when you spend eight hours in that kind of chill in a leather jacket, no hat, nothing, it’s a whole different story. Because of the shoot, we all suffered the consequences for the next 14 days.
We shot with a great crew made up of Urša Lorber, Mojca Kamnik, Marko Pavlak and our director Tadej Ošlovnik, who also shot the very first Thraw video, the legendary Injecting hate, 14 years ago. Yeah, we put a huge amount of stock in tradition here too. As it says in the video description, it’s very important to us to work with more or less the same people, lifelong friends we’ve never had any conflicts with and have been working with regularly for 20 years on projects from A to Z. We’re very proud of that, because it’s something that doesn’t exist in Slovenian metal.
The setting was ideal for the video’s theme. Later we added ‘stock footage’, meaning clips from various archives that matched the theme of the lyrics. I also suggested that the video absolutely must have the option to turn on subtitles, so you can read the lyrics while watching, which allows for a better interpretation of the whole thing.
Dare we ask about your plans?
The plans aren’t much different from what they were at the very beginning. We always promised ourselves we’d never stop, or rather the two of us, my brother and I, did. I myself only joined Thraw in 2011, which means the band spent its first five years, let’s call them the golden years, running without me, since I was active in my other Slovenian band, Wartune, at the time. But even back then, between 2006 and 2007, we had a joint project, Scepsis, where we played nothing but tribute stuff.
The plan has always been that we’ll never stop operating in any form, and we stick to that. We’ve never eaten our words. We’ve always kept everything we promised, especially what we promised ourselves, since we do this first and foremost for ourselves. It sounds a bit selfish, but still… First we do it for ourselves, purely to satisfy that inner drive that wants us to get this out of our system, and if people listen to it after that, all the better.
Well, there are a few surprises in the works too, which will be revealed shortly, but in any case… Thraw will live forever!
