Edder & Bile

After 16 years of dormancy, Cadaver has coming roaring back. Led by founding guitarist/vocalist Anders “Neddo” Odden and featuring new drummer Dirk Verbeuren (also of Megadeth), the Norwegian death metal veterans return with Edder & Bile, their first album since 2004’s Necrosis. “It feels good to be back,” Odden tells Apple Music. “The fact that people remember the band is great, but it’s also a big responsibility for us to come up with something new that is actually up to par with whatever people think we did in the past. But it should be like that: You should be challenging yourself to make the best record each time.” Odden need not worry. Edder & Bile feels as invigorating as Cadaver’s 1990 debut, Hallucinating Anxiety—which, incidentally, was one of Verbeuren’s favorite albums growing up. “I met Dirk in 2014, and he told me he was a Cadaver fan,” Odden recalls. “But I didn’t realize how deep it went until we sat and talked. So I sent him some tracks I was working on and he came back very fast with really cool stuff. He’s a very big reason I’m doing this again. Without him, I wouldn’t have the right energy.”

Morgue Ritual
“That was one of the songs which is based on my leftover material from the very beginning of Cadaver. On the very first rehearsal tape we did in '88, there was a song called ‘Morgue Rifling.’ So the riffs are basically from that song, which I wrote when I was 16 years old, but we never used it for the first album. I think one reason was that it kind of felt a little too thrash-metal-ish at the time. So we redid the arrangements and updated the drums, and that made a huge difference. And the lyrics are rewritten. It’s about how humankind is always trying to find meaning, and we always blame gods or entities outside ourselves for good or bad stuff, when we are in fact responsible for everything ourselves.”

Circle of Morbidity (feat. Jeff Becerra)
“Jeff Becerra from Possessed is on this one, which in itself is a huge landmark on the record. At the time we recorded the album, I was staying with Dirk and his wife, Hannah, in LA. She’s a photographer, and she was doing a shoot with Possessed in her studio. I’d never met Jeff before that day, but we got along really well, and he’s of course one of my inspirations when it comes to vocals and also lyrics. So I asked him on the spot if he would contribute to the album, and he immediately said yes. We actually recorded his part in the driveway at Dirk’s house. I thought it would be the demo, but it turned out to be good enough to put on the record.”

Feed the Pigs (feat. Kam Lee)
“This is the first track me and Dirk finalized writing together back in 2016. It was actually the same day he officially joined Megadeth. He was in Norway playing with them, but at that point he was still a fill-in drummer. He was playing a huge festival near where I live, so I picked him up for a jam. I wasn't 100% sure on how to do all the vocals on the album, and because the track had some parts in the verses that both me and Dirk felt were like old Death and Massacre, that kind of Florida death metal style, we thought maybe we should contact Kam, who I’ve been in touch with since the Myspace era. He responded that same night, and it came out really, really well.”

Final Fight
“This one is actually based on some leftovers I had for another project from 10 years ago called Doctor Midnight & The Mercy Cult, with Hank von Hell on vocals and Tim Sköld from Marilyn Manson. During that process, there were so many people writing that I ended up with lots of things that didn’t necessarily fit to that band’s style. But the lyrics are basically about being backstabbed by bandmates or people in your life that are trying to fuck something up for you. Being in bands for such a long time, that’s something that’s kind of unavoidable—but then you get over it.”

Deathmachine
“‘Deathmachine’ is actually a rearranging and rewriting of a song which was 20 years ago part of the Cadaver Inc. album, Discipline. I always felt like that song didn’t really come through in the way I wanted it to—it was a little too jumpy, and I wanted it to be heavier. So I rewrote it, kind of in the tradition of how Metallica did ‘The Unforgiven’ and then ‘The Unforgiven II’ and ‘The Unforgiven III.’ It’s got a little bit of Norwegian black metal flavor in it, and it was originally inspired by The Matrix movie, so it feels very apocalyptic and up-to-date now, especially in this time when everything is falling apart and the world is very strange.”

Reborn
“This is a song where I emphasize the circle of life, and it’s written in a way where all the riffs never repeat in the same way, so it reflects life itself. We also have a video for it, which reflects the timeless human story where we’re always being ripped apart by famine, plague, or war. In Norwegian folklore, the plague is personified by a female figure coming to your house to wipe everybody out with her broom, and her name was Pesta. My daughter Regine plays Pesta in the video, and she did all the makeup, so it was really cool to collaborate with her. It’s also a reflection of my own story this year, having been reborn after surviving colon cancer. So it’s a really special song for me in every way.”

The Pestilence
“This song title might seem like it was decided recently, but this was written in April of 2019. I would never dare do that now, because it feels like low-hanging fruit. But it does feel a bit like I was Nostradamus, because the song is about a pandemic that wipes out the whole population of the world. But the cool thing about being part of an extreme metal band is that we’ve always been writing about the end of the world. And the title partly comes from the Dutch death metal band Pestilence, because the opening riff is a bit similar to a riff they had on a compilation in 1990.”

Edder & Bile
“The title comes from an old Danish and Norwegian expression. ‘Edder’ is the Scandinavian word that means poison, and in English the word ‘adder’ means poisonous snake. In medieval times, they thought that evil and anything bad was related to body fluids, whether it be bile or blood or whatever. So the method to get well was to drain people of different fluids—therefore the expression is to ‘pour out the edder and bile.’ It means pouring out the evil, basically.”

Years of Nothing
“The lyrics to this one are basically about how if you try to do things, that’s much better than to not dare to try things. If you’re going to have regrets in life, make them about things you actually did—not things you didn’t do. Musically, it has an homage to Norwegian black metal forms, but the first riff is also an homage to the first track on the first Cadaver album. I wanted to make something to link to Hallucinating Anxiety, and I think it doesn’t really count as a rip-off if you’re ripping off yourself. Dirk also told me this is the hardest Cadaver song to play on drums, and I think most drummers listening to this track will note that factor.”

Let Me Burn
“This is the only song I wrote entirely in the studio. It was January of 2019, and it was raining really hard in LA. I was sitting in the studio, thinking about how it would feel to be roasted alive—like the total opposite of being in the rain. So I felt like this was a good plan for the ending song on the album—to disappear and be burnt. It’s also about the closure of the process of dying, which is really interesting. When we die, we go back to the earth. We all know this, but it’s a really fascinating concept to realize that when we die, all the atoms that used to be you or me go back to the soil and potentially give life to something else.”