Answered Luana.
Questions prepared - Jakub Asphyx.
Translated by Petra, thank you!
Ave NERVOSA! During the past two years you have played 2 times on Brutal Assault festival in the Czech Republic and you played on Obscene Extreme. You also have had some small concerts in clubs. It looks like you like the Czech Republic. Which concert was the most successful for you? What do you think about Czech fans?
Brutal Assault was the most successful one, I’m saying this cause it’s the biggest, and the crowd we had there was huge, it will always be a dream to play at Brutal Assault, it’s a very famous and organized festival, I hope we can come back there in some years! Czech fans are great, like all our fans around the world, we have many Czech friends too, so sometimes we are in Czech Republic just to see friends and have some days off!
Every time I say the name NERVOSA, everybody knows who you are. “That is the band of beautiful thrash girls, I saw them play live and they were awesome”: that is what I get the most. How did it happen that you started to play this kind of music? Someone would probably expect you to more rather “more modern” metal.
We are all girls that individually liked this kind of music, and for lucky we found each other to play this together. There is a lot of young people playing old school Metal, it’s not something hard to find now days, we are just another of theses cases.
The only original member is Prika. Correct me if I am wrong, but Fernanda joined NERVOSA after a year. When I look on the list of musicians who played in your band, there is only one man – Amílcar from TORTURE SQUAD. And that was it, you only play with women. Was it a condition? Did you and do you want to be purely female band? Is it difficult to find good members for a band?
That wasn’t official, Amilcar played with us and recorded our first album, cause it was right after our first drummer left the band, we needed to recorded and we didn’t have a drummer in that moment, so our friend Amilcar did this for us. The band will always be only female, we want to keep like this, and it’s not very easy to find someone that fits in the band. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, it’s always hard to find someone that wants to leave the family, the job, and a big part of the personal life, to live constantly in the road and live as a professional musician. At the beginning we are not able to earn money for living properly with the band, but if you don’t leave your job and your family to try hard, you never gonna figure out if you can live only as a musician in the future, that’s why it’s so hard to find good members for the band, cause Nervosa is a full time job.
You have already done two albums (and one demo album from 2012). They both are in the style of classic thrash metal. How did you create those albums? I would like to know the whole process of composing an album with NERVOSA. Are you a democratic band or there is one person who has the final word in your band?
The band is very democratic, everyone helps and the result of what the fans are listening is what the band did together. We don’t live close to each other, it means that we don’t have the possibility of meeting for rehearsals or to compose in person, so when someone has an idea, this one records it in the cellphone and send it by e-mail, then the other ones can create things on it and give more ideas or ask to change. We are composing like this until we find a good result for what we imagined in the beginning, and when we have a good amount of songs, I’m (Luana) flying to São Paulo to a rehearsal, where we play the songs until we correct all the details.
Who is the author of your lyrics and what are they about? Where do you find your inspiration? Personally, I feel that writing lyrics is very difficult. How do you create your lyrics?
Fernanda and Prika are writing the lyrics, I’m not participating in this process. The inspiration comes from what we live in our daily life, from things that are happening around us, what society is doing. A very few things are coming from personal experiences, but in general we talk about society. I feel that writing lyrics is very difficult too, that’s why I’m only playing drums, haha.
You come from Sao Paulo, just like one of my favourite bands of all time – SEPULTURA. But there are many great bands, for example the good old VULCANO and many other. It looks like your scene is very strong. But you also travel a lot to Europe to play concerts. Could you please try to compare those two scenes – Europe and Brazil? Are your fans livelier, wild or do they have a different approach to music? Who buys more CDs and merch?
The fans in Brazil and South America are more “warm”, we say. They scream, jump and mosh a lot, everything is crazier in South America, but we also understand that it’s hard to buy merch living here, cause we don’t have plenty of money to spend on this very much, when we can spend to go to a gig and pay the tickets, it’s already very good. In Europe people are not so crazy, we feel that they prefer to watch very well what you’re doing on stage, and not go too crazy, but in Europe people have a better life quality, so we are selling more merch, people can buy these things easily there, it’s understandable. Both are great and we appreciate to play in this places very very much, it’s different, but equally good.
I saw you in Prague where you played a small concert and at the end you played the song “Wayfarer” with a little bit of blues. I like this song so much. It makes me think who was your idol when you started to play? Thrash classic bands were obviously your idols but what about blues bands?
This song is really great, but I can’t say much about it cause I wasn’t in the band when it was composed. I’m not listening to blues, my favourite styles out of Metal are Indie Rock and a bit of Rap.
You are young beautiful girls. You perform on festivals and travel around the world. I admit that it is a pleasure to look at you. Do you have any problems sometimes? Let´s not fool ourselves, metal is more male thing and sometimes it is difficult for fans to separate music from vision. So do guys hit on you? They probably do…a lot right?
The majority is respectful and can understand that we are there as musicians, and it’s totally not related to our personal life, but of course there is some people that are inconvenient, and say a lot of bad and sometimes disgusting things to us, we are trying to avoid these kind of people and move on, cause they can’t get the attention they want.
You travel a lot and you are together a lot. I worked for women for 2 whole months and they were always fighting, arguing and gossiping. :) Do you sometimes get tired of each other? Are you able to go for a drink together or on a party even after years of being in the band?
We get tired of ourselves during the tours, but it’s normal, since we start a tour, we play together, eat together, share a room at the hotel, travel in the same van all day, at some point we just don’t wanna talk, it’s better to put earphones and have a bit of silence, it doesn’t mean that we don’t like each other, it’s just too much time together. Out of the band, we can totally go somewhere as good friends and do something.
Each band has some dream. Some wants to play on one stage with SLAYER other wants to release an album with a huge label. What dream or target does NERVOSA have?
The Slayer example was very good, maybe our dream is to tour with Slayer someday and be their opening act, haha. I think in general we just want to get better and better, and everyday make things even more professional to us, tour in much better conditions and keep recordings professional sounding albums, get better every album, I don’t think we have any bigger dream than this, keep improving.
Do you even have time for listening your favourite music? I can imagine you only play on concerts and record albums. Do you follow what is happening on your local music scene, do you like to discover new albums? If so, what album caught your attention lately? Do you know any Czech bands?
I would say that we listen to our favourite music inside the van while we travel, haha, that’s the free time we have to listen to what we want, and anyways, that’s the only thing we can do while we travel. Each of us like to listen to different things in out free time, so we are following different music scenes. I personally love to discover new albums and bands, I’m a big fan of vinyls, and if I could I would spend all my money supporting and discovering new albums, this is such a hobbie. The last album that caught my attention was Vegeance, from the Swedish band Dreadful Fate. We probably know many, we are just not aware that they’re from Czech Republic, haha
What are NERVOSA´s plans for the next few months?
To keep touring around the world, and then finally have some vacations in the end of the year with our family and friends!
Thank you so much for the interview and I wish you and your band a lot of sold out concerts and fans who want to rip your hands off for your merch and CDs. I also wish you a good luck in your personal lives.
about NERVOSA on DEADLY STORM ZINE/ o NERVOSE na DEADLY STORM ZINE
