Before We All Die: CLAWFINGER Return With Perfectly Timed Fury

Interview by Ali Williams
Clawfinger's Bård Torstensen stopped in for a chat with HEAVY Magzine's Ali Williams to fill in the gaps after their long standing hiatus on new releases. After nineteen years between albums, Clawfinger could have returned with something painfully self-important, full of mythology and creative suffering. Instead, Bård talks about it with the kind of dry honesty that makes the whole thing far more endearing. Before We All Die arrives not as some grand rock resurrection, but as the product of a band that simply figured out how to make it work in a world that had changed around them. 
Back when the CD market collapsed, the practical choice was to get jobs, keep playing the good gigs, and stop pretending the old model still paid the bills. That pause stretched into nearly two decades, which is a long time to leave fans hanging, but Clawfinger have enough self-awareness to see the humour in that too. 
One of the key points of interest is that the new record was built remotely, with files flying back and forth instead of bodies standing around a studio trying not to annoy each other. Torstensen makes it sound almost civilised. He could sit with an idea, have a coffee, eat dinner, decide a part sounded awful, sleep on it, then come back the next day and fix it without the pressure of a studio clock ticking away in the background. For a band that has been together long enough to know exactly how each other thinks, that distance sounds less like compromise and more like self-preservation with better acoustics. The result is a process that feels modern without being clinical, and flexible without losing the band’s bite. 
The album title itself came from a manager’s plea for the band to make another record “before we all die”, which is funny on its face but also lands neatly in Clawfinger territory. This has never been a band interested in dressing things up with delicate metaphors and interpretive dance. Their whole identity has long been built on staring directly at the mess and saying it plainly. Torstensen points to war, political absurdity and environmental collapse as the obvious backdrop, and in that light Before We All Die stops sounding like a throwaway joke and starts sounding like the most Clawfinger title possible. Grim, blunt, slightly hilarious, and uncomfortably on the money. 
There's a significant element of reassuring unglamorous quality about the way Clawfinger still operate. The band only rehearses together once or twice a year, which sounds reckless until Torstensen shrugs and points out that sometimes they just walk onstage after months apart and it still works. That kind of confidence only comes from years in the trenches, though he does admit a full new album means a little more homework than the occasional stray song. He also jokes about past drummer changes being a bit Spinal Tap, but beyond that the line-up has been largely steady since 2007, which probably helps when you are trying to restart the machine after a nineteen-year recording gap without the whole thing flying off the rails. 
For now, the action is centred in Europe, where summer festivals and an upcoming club run through Central Europe have the band moving with real momentum again. Torstensen sounds genuinely excited by the prospect of getting back on a bus and doing a proper tour, and even more encouraged by the fact that tickets are moving well enough for venues to be upgraded. Australia, sadly, remains on the wish list rather than the itinerary. Clawfinger have never played here, and Torstensen himself has never even visited, describing the country as “exotic” in a way that will probably make Australian readers laugh into their coffee. Still, between a new album, a receptive European market and a global fanbase that has clearly not forgotten them, there is a sense that Clawfinger are not just returning for nostalgia’s sake. They sound like a band that still has something to say and, more...