All of these changes through the years are important for us, but playing what we play now is very important. We have molded our music. When we started off we were very young; we played black metal and we thought it was so cool. It was. The second record came along and we got signed on that particular sound from _In Times Before the Light_ and it was very difficult. We felt restrained a bit and not able to really take the music where we wanted to. We couldn't freak out in any way with the music because we felt pressure from the listeners and the label. But on this record we felt we had to show off a bit and that is exactly what we did. We are showing the metal community that we are supplying an edge to their music.
Lex Icon / The Kovenant interview, Chronicles of Chaos, 1999
THE KOVENANT released their third album, In Times Before the Light, on this day in 2002 through Hammerheart.
...I pay attention and I still listen to metal but the thing is when we did "SETI" we really wanted to do something different comparing to so many black metal band these days. I really don't have any inspiration toward making black metal anymore. I also grow up listening to 80 pop music like Alphaville, Depeche Mode, bands like Duran Duran and I wanted to incorporate some of that electronic 80s into the music and still keep it metal.
Lex Icon / The Kovenant interview, Metal Bite, 2003
In Times... is a re-imagining (remix & partial re-recording) of the 1997 debut album when the band were known as COVENANT.
...when we recorded this album we were 16-17 years old, that's ten years ago. We paid for everything ourselves and we ended doing everything we wanted to do with that album. The production was a little bit poor and I thought about this as a great opportunity to redo the thing and make it as sort of ultimate edition but mainly we did it for ourselves.
Lex Icon / The Kovenant interview, Metal Bite, 2003