It became obvious to us early on that if you put in too many exotic elements, at some point it’s no longer really a metal record. Different Nile albu… - Karl Sanders

Basically, if you’re a guitar player, there’s riffs that are going to come out. It just happens. It’s part of it. So we’re not lacking in inspiration. George (Kollias) is always playing drums, so he’s always got drum ideas. You know, (guitarists) Brian (Kingsland) and Zach (Jeter) are always playing. So there are always new guitar ideas. It’s not necessarily an endless well, and not every riff that we come up with manages to make its way into a song. That is where it comes from; we love to play music, so we’re always riffing. But, as soon as you try to dictate to the muse, it goes away. You can’t force yourself to be creative. You can be disciplined and work on your craft every day. That’s a little bit different. Not always is gold just gonna fall out of the sky, like when you hear a Nile record. You know that’s not just because we sat down in 10 minutes and said, “Okay, we’re done writing the record”. No, those songs took years to put together. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into taking the inspiration that we had and crafting it into something.

Sometimes the riffs, the ideas that are simpler, make a more direct connection and you can allow it to have that weight. Heaviness, doom, it’s a very elusive quality. If you get too tricky with it you lose that feeling of doom very quickly. It’s fleeting. It will run away, like a deer!

I think we’re aliens. I think we’re not necessarily native to this planet. I think we came here from somewhere else, destroyed ourselves a couple of times, and what’s left after all that period of chaos, that’s what we have left, and that’s why no one knows where the fuck we came from. The early part of human history and civilisation is riddled with unknowns. Where did we come from? Where did these ideas come from? How do the Egyptians have such an advanced civilisation? Well, I think it came from before and just no one remembers. (The) last Ice Age, when the sea levels rose 400 meters. There’s a whole lot of stuff sitting out there, covered by water that we have no idea where the fuck it is. What was there? Just imagine if you took our sea level right now and raised it by 400 meters, how much of our current civilisation would then be underwater? So what happened at the end of the last stage? How do we know what was before the end of the last ice age? We only have a few things you know left. So you know, and how much shit survives 10,000 years of natural decay? Not much. Why do we still even know about the Egyptians? Well, they managed to build some shit that lasted 1000s of years, right? Otherwise, would we know anything about them? No, we wouldn’t; or it just be speculation, hearsay, and rumour.