Interview: Van Labrakis of Nite

On 12th april i got the chance to interview Van Labrakis, the lead singer and guitar player of a blackened heavy metal group Nite from San Francisco. Nite played at On the rocks in Helsinki as a part of their European tour promoting their latest album, “Cult of the Serpent Sun”.

Alex Dingley: 

How’s the tour been treating you so far?

Van Labrakis:

It’s been great. Today is actually our last day, we’re going home tomorrow. It was a little bit less than two weeks, we started at the Inferno Festival which was a very big deal for us and it was definitely the highlight of this tour so far. But we loved it everywhere, every place was different. We really wanted to make the trip over to Europe for many years. We finally made it happen and we’re really happy about that. 

Great, so you’ve finally made it come true! How has the feedback of the European audiences been towards your latest album, “Cult of the Serpent Sun”?

It’s the most successful album we’ve done to date and we can see that people are very excited about it. We’ve definitely gained new fans that didn’t know us before. That happens with every album. We’ve got all these metrics and numbers and we know where people listen to our music. We have been very successful in Europe since the first album and I think it has to do with the fact that we sound like a European metal band – I’m from Europe, from Greece. I grew up in Greece and then lived in Germany for a long time. I like a lot of German bands, as do the other three – especially Scott, the other guitar player. We like Helloween and Blind Guardian, Gamma Ray and all these bands from the 80s and the 90s that we grew up with. So European metal is a part of our sound. It’s natural that people from here also like it.

Going back to “Cult of the Serpent Sun” – what’s the actual meaning behind the title? Is it something personal to you, or more like an open metaphor for your fans to interpret?

We tend to use metaphors a lot, and symbols and mythology throughout our discography – that’s how we go about creating our music and lyrics. “Cult of the Serpent Sun” means different things to all four of us, and it should naturally mean different things to everybody that listens to it. I think that’s the beauty of mythology and symbology – that words can be interpreted under different prisms and you get different ideas, but the essence of it is the same. We might be talking about the whole Trump thing in the United States, or about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia – so these are all things that have affected us, that did happen during the writing of that album. There are songs in there that are definitely about the war that’s still happening.

At the same time, they’re written in this very subtle manner that people can interpret in many other ways.

Yeah. I mean, there are some key things in the song “Cult of the Serpent Sun” – like a mindless movement of people joining the cult, then following some leader, in the theme that death is eternal, that it’s gonna come for everybody and that the void is eternal. It’s basically us reflecting on the idea of life and death. That’s a big part of what we do – reflecting on these subjects. 

Still, as much as your music refers a lot to darkness, there’s also that visible fun that playing live gigs brings you – how do you guys find the balance between the darkness of the music and the joy onstage?

Perseverance through hard times is the center. That’s what we mean with the word “Nite” basically. We initially thought about naming ourselves “NIGHT”, like the actual word… Well, there’s another band with that name! [laughs] There are many bands with the name “Nite” also, but the essence is that we can persevere through dark times. And then, finding light and joy and finding the strength to rise up again in the darkness is part of what we do. And it has to do with what the bands that we were listening to as kids did for us – like for me, personally, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Metallica and all these bands really helped me go through hard times. Like when I didn’t wanna go to school or I had family trouble in some way and I didn’t know if I would get the strength and continue with my life. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

So you’re giving back the same way, basically.

Exactly.

It seems like it has a lot in common with that verse of [your song] “Genesis”, “we are the light in the night”.

Right. “We are the light in the night”, that lyric has to do with all of us. It doesn’t have to do with the band. The visual that we had back then was: the emptiness of space, and there’s this little light, and we are all in it. We are all these people that are fighting each other. We are struggling, and crying, and laughing, all on that little speck of dust in the middle of nothingness. And we are alive right now, so we are that light in the vastness of death basically. So – putting things into perspective – being alive IS a win. Because we are here – we are already winning against the nothingness, you know what i mean?

Wow, yeah. That’s a beautiful motive. 

Thank you. I didn’t come up with it – we all came up with it. [laughs]

Right, I’ll remember that. [laughs] And… as much as your vocals bring that black metal accent to the band, the general sound is closer to the classic heavy metal. How did it come about? Was it spontaneous, or was that an idea that you guys had before you started the band?

Before I met the guys, I remember I was listening a lot to the album “Children of the night” by Tribulation. That kind of sparked the idea in me that the guys at the time sounded like “Killers” era Iron Maiden with this amazing voice – i really love his voice. And I am a singer now, cause I’ve been doing it for 8 years, but [back then] I wasn’t a singer. I just did some rough demos to try it out. With the guys we did try many singers out, but I was burnt before by flaky singers. And I was afraid to base that on somebody else because it did happen – we did have someone and then they just stopped showing up.I know how much work it takes to be consistent and to keep going at it. So it was out of necessity that I started singing here. That said, in the beginning I was doing everything I could, I was not THAT singer – I was pretty terrible. [laughs] And with every album I got better. Now I have all this experience with playing all these shows and especially back to back shows, like last year we did – for other people it might be nothing, but for me it is a lot – we did ten shows back to back, and I was singing like that for ten days. Like, if you’re not doing it right, you’re not gonna be able to do it – you’re gonna blow your voice. I had to practice a lot, and start with a vocal coaches, and all that. So this is what I can do. This is the best way I can express myself and I think it couples with the guitar style very well. I love having this contrast between my guitar playing and my singing, and the guys seem to like it, so we keep doing it! Also, a fun fact – Scott, the other guitar player, also sings backup vocals, and on the next album we’re working on we’re trying to share more of the vocal parts. He has a slightly more death metal voice than me. You will see tonight that he also sings parts of songs.

Great! Have you guys already recorded the material for the new album?

Yeah, the fourth album is pretty much laid out, we have eight songs. I don’t know if it’s gonna be eight… We like doing 8-song-albums, it’s easy to wrap your head around – for us, as well. So we have the eight songs, we have recorded most of it. We haven’t finished, of course. We’re hoping to wrap it up in the summer, maybe – if everything goes well – we can deliver to the label and have it out by next year, but we’ll see. Things happen, so I don’t know exactly how it’s gonna play out.

Would you say that because of Scott’s vocals [the new album] is going to be a bit closer to death metal, though?

I don’t think so, no.

So you’re sticking to your genre, the blackened heavy metal?

Actually, this album is a little bit more adventurous. It’s a bit early to say how it’s gonna go, but we do have more keyboards, we do have more relaxed songs, kind of like what “Carry on” is on the latest album. We have been trying things out. I think something that is obvious to us is that we don’t have much to prove right now. I think we’ve shown what we can do with albums, and that we can write good songs that we all like. We don’t want to make another “Voices of the Kronian Moon” or another “Cult of the Serpent Sun”, so we wanna make the next thing for us, and hopefully we’re not gonna mess it up, you know? [laughs]

So, it seems like by now you have really found your musical identity. Like, you’re technically still experimenting, but right now you know exactly where you’re heading. 

Yeah, experimentation is a part of this.

I guess so, it’s progress!

Yeah. And the songs that you’ve heard so far from us, they’re not really songs that we plan very well. They’re more songs that just kind of happen. We do write a lot of songs, and we try to do unexpected things – we’re not afraid to do weird things. That has happened many times, like the song from the new album, “Cult of the Serpent Sun” – it’s a pretty weird, unconventional song – it might sound normal but it’s not normal to play, it’s very complicated. I still can’t really understand where that came from. But it’s something that we tried out and it sounded cool and we liked playing it, and… we kept it. So, yeah, we always love experimenting and trying things just because “this sounds cool”. This is part of our essence.

Now, for the end – what can your Finnish audience expect from you tonight? What kind of experience would you like them to have?

I hope that they’ll get to see who we are, because that’s very hard to hide right now – we have a very particular show. We’ve done it a lot in the United States, and I want to think that we know how to make people have a good time. I’m very glad that we get to bring that here, to this part of the world. It’s gonna have its ups and downs. There are moments in the set that we’re gonna go a little bit lighter because it’s a longer set. It’s not at a hundred percent high energy all of the time, but I think you’re going to get a very clear idea of what we’re like in 2026.

The On the rocks gig was indeed a great show that delivered a satisfying experience to all kinds of metal fans. The band met a great feedback of their mindblown audience. Fingers crossed for Nite’s new album – we’re excited for what’s coming next.