Tobias Forge

If you ever want to play bigger places, you need to have records that sound like you're playing in big places.

I'm a big fan of a lot of prog music. As a record collector as well, I won't throw anybody or any band under the bus, but a lot of the records are fun to collect, are not necessarily very good. There are a lot of prog bands out there that it's a really cool record, but it's, like, not really there.

In an alternative life, I would have loved to work in film - I love film.

The belief in something bigger and supernatural is not the same thing as linear religion.

My mom is very liberal. She has never been religious... spiritual but not religious.

My first teacher... was extremely strict, mean, and deeply religious.

Since I remember still very clearly what it was like not being popular or in a successful band, I know that things go up and down, and you cannot expect this to be on the same trajectory forever. It won't be. Because even if you get to be the biggest band in the world, it's gonna change.

If you've followed us from when we started playing live in October 2010, you will notice that there has been numerous changes over the years.

More than often, what you see, or what we've been able to recreate, has usually been a tampered-with version of what I have in my head, because the original idea has always been bigger. Every time I am in the mode of creating a show, there's always some level of gravity that comes in play, either of a monetary sort, or there's a space issue.

My ability maps my own writing. I haven't spent a whole lot of time biting licks from the really quick masters. That's why I'm not very good at that sort of super-fast, shreddy sweeping. So I've never considered myself a traditionally good, fast-playing guitarist.

It would have been easy to try to make 'Opus Eponymous II' and just stick with a routine. But it just felt like, if this is going to go anywhere, we need to take big steps every time.

You need to have spent your time from playing Top 40 pop rock in order to know how to play a song like 'Ritual,' a song like 'Absolution' or 'Idolatrine.' You need to know your classic drumming and your classic guitar.