We had finished with the last Bathory album and I had some material, and wanted to try making a solo record. It was something I wanted to do.
Quorthon / Bathory interview, Chronicles of Chaos, 1995
Following the sixth album, Twilight of the Gods (1991), BATHORY took an extended break. Quorthon decided to record a solo record and released Album on this day in 1994.
We have decided, that we should take an enormously long break... We already have since the "Twilight Of The Gods" album, but it's very difficult to come up with something new right now. If you've released an album like "Twilight", you can't go back and write some simple Speed Metal tracks, you know. So we really painted ourselves into a corner and we can't get out of that anymore... But I have a project, that I'm working on right now, that'll feature some music which won't fit under the BATHORY umbrella, so to speak. It'll be released under the name QUORTHON!
Quorthon / Bathory interview, Voices from the Darkside, 1994
Lyrically and musically Album was a pretty dramatic shift away from BATHORY and the reaction was (and remains) mixed. At the time Slayer zine gave it some qualified praise, "with early hardrock influences Quorthon delivers pure rock in a very extraordinary way. Maybe nothing for the average BATHORY fanatic, but still a very good release. Worthy objective listening without comparing it to the BATHORY masterpieces."
[Lyrics are] just normal, daily happenings basically. Everything can be taken with a pinch of salt. A bit cynic, but it is nothing of a concept. It is plain normal rock lyrics... You go through different levels in lyrics as well. The only reason we brought up the Satanic lyrics was that we were very young. When we started in March '83 we were about 13-15 years old and the only experiences we had of something revolting was Satanism. IT was the stuff we were interested in. We grew up with Chock Magazines and Dracula movies from the '70, so it was like a protest thing. Just link punk or the skin movement is today. Also, the bands you were listening to during the 70ies and 80ies... MOTORHEAD, SAXON etc. They took a lot of drugs, drank, fucked a lot of beautiful girls and drove around on motorcycles. But we were to young to do drugs, driving around on motorcycles and to fuck girls... So we couldn't write about that. We had no experiences.
Quorthon / Bathory interview, Metal Zone, 1994
...when the first one was recorded, I was completely, you know, didn't have one single idea of what the future of Bathory was gonna be like, so, it was like: "Go inside the studio, record anything you wanna do, you know, I mean, just stay active," and if I haven't done the first one, you know, I'd lost all the love for playing guitar and writing songs, you know. Since the first one came out, you know, it's almost 4 years, 5 years of working with Bathory, so every three or four albums there will be a solo album, if this continues...
...it was an important thing to do, but afterwards I realized: hey, this is great fun, you know, being in the studio playing again, cause, you know, I was thinking about cutting my hair off and getting some kind of academic education or whatever, you know, go to school and, you know, fuck someone, have a kid, and, you know, get married, and live out in the suburb, or something. Uhm, and I got doing too much promotion thing for the solo album, explaining why there was a solo album-I mean, it was a big thing back then, I mean, today people are more or less used to it: there's a Quorthon album out, but in those days, it was like: "What now, is Bathory over?" And I talked to all these old fans, they've been following the band for like, 14 years, and said, uh: "don't break up," and, you know, "we're right behind you." And I was just so fucking nourished with all this, you know, enthusiasm, and I realized how much Bathory have meant to a lot of people. So when I came back to Stockholm, in two weeks time I'd written all of the material that eventually ended up on "Requiem"...
Quorthon / Bathory interview, Metal Underground, 1997
When you were writing songs for BATHORY it had to fit with a certain concept, a certain system soundwise. Also the lyrics should be in a special way so you were jumping around lyrically just to widen the horizons. I wish that we had concentrated a bit more on the sound on the first albums, but we didn't really understand that this material would be on albums forever. When we recorded in the studio is was roughly like being in the rehearsal place. Also it could be very rough. We mostly had 8-12 channels to work with and it was maybe like 40 sounds. in the beginning of a song it might have been acoustic guitars, and then on the same channel it could also be a solo, so it was hard to mix as well. The reason why I did this solo album was to show people that I wrote material beside the band as well.
Quorthon / Bathory interview, Metal Zone, 1994