A Dirty Dozen with MARCO HEUBAUM from XANDRIA – July 2026

Photo Credit: Stefan Heilemann / Mirko Witzki

According to a recent press release: “German symphonic metal band XANDRIA presents the third single from their upcoming album, Eclipse. “Northstar” is a guiding light in their discography. The track features uplifting dynamics with Celtic tin and low whistles, weaving together heavy guitars, cinematic grandeur, and folk elements, to create a journey full of discoveries. Looking back on a career spanning more than 30 years and several chart entries, XANDRIA are aiming higher than ever—something they will also showcase on their upcoming European tour, kicking off in September this year. Eclipse marks XANDRIA’s most outspoken and cinematic album so far: A dark, colourful, and defiant statement for reason, empathy, and democracy in times when all three are under attack, brought to life by a band fueled with new energy, new ambitions, and a clear artistic direction, aiming higher than ever and not looking back!” We get band mastermind Marco Heubaum to discuss new music, influences, and more…

1. Tell us a little about your latest release.  What might a fan or listener not grab the first or second time they listen through?  Are there any hidden nuggets you put in the material or that only diehard fans might find?

Our new album is called Eclipse, and I think what people may not grasp immediately is just how far it reaches beyond what is commonly called symphonic metal – which I only mention as a term because that´s the drawer people tend to open. It is very easy to hear a female voice, orchestration, heavy guitars and a strong chorus and think: “Okay, I know what kind of album this is.” And that may even be meant positively. But for us, that is only the surface. Once you really dive into the songs, you find musical worlds that are rarely brought together at all – let alone within the same song. “Colours,” for example, moves between modern djent riffs, ethereal passages, film-score elements and classical vocals, before suddenly opening into a melodic rock guitar solo. “Wave of Tanis” carries traces of 1980s stadium rock, with drums that have a slight Phil Collins feel and little bluesy guitar lines surrounding the vocals. “The Last Generation” begins almost like an Elton John ballad, develops into a rhythmically driven section with a children’s choir like Michael Jackson used to do, and later features a guitar solo much closer to Pink Floyd than to anything people would normally associate with symphonic metal. Elsewhere, you may find gospel colours along a Roxette-like refrain, black-metal intensity, Celtic rock, power metal, modern metal and orchestral writing inspired by John Williams and Hans Zimmer. And none of those elements are there as a gimmick. They are part of the identity and story of the song. That is probably the real hidden layer of Eclipse: every song has its own very particular universe. The choruses may pull you in first, but the more closely you listen, the more absurd it becomes to reduce the album to one genre label. Calling it simply “another symphonic metal album” would be as much missing the point as describing a film by saying that it contains moving pictures. Technically true, and almost impressively blind to everything that actually matters.

2. What got you into music, and can you tell us about the moment you realized you wanted to be a musician?

My father played guitar and listened to a lot of 1970s rock music when I was a child, so music was always present around me. Seeing him play definitely planted the idea that music was not only something coming out of a television or a record player, it was something you could actually create yourself. But one of my earliest very concrete career plans was slightly more ambitious. When I was about six or seven, I was a huge ABBA fan, and whenever I saw them on television, I thought: “That is the band I am going to join when I grow up.” ABBA still existed at the time, so in my mind this was an entirely reasonable plan. I had not yet understood that internationally successful bands do not usually keep a vacant position open for a German primary-school child. But the feeling behind it was real. I did not only want to listen to music, I wanted to be inside it. Eventually I understood that joining ABBA might be logistically difficult, so I would have to create my own music and build my own band instead. It took me until I was seventeen or eighteen to actually start playing guitar, but once I did, I began writing songs and forming my own projects almost immediately. So the road from aspiring fifth member of ABBA to founding Xandria was perhaps not entirely straight, but the basic idea never really changed.

3. Building on that, is there a specific song, album, performer, or live show that guided your musical taste?

There were obviously many albums and artists that shaped me, but if I had to name the record that planted the original seed for what would later become Xandria, it would probably be Tiamat’s Wildhoney. I had never heard anything like it before, and, at that point, I am not sure anybody had. Tiamat came from black and death metal roots, but suddenly they opened that music up into something atmospheric, psychedelic and almost cinematic, with influences ranging from Pink Floyd to Fields of the Nephilim. Those things should perhaps not have belonged together, but on that album they created an entirely new world. That was a genuine revelation to me. It showed me that metal did not have to remain inside its own stylistic walls. You could take its darkness and power, combine it with music from completely different universes, and create something larger than any of the individual ingredients. In that sense, Wildhoney still shapes what I do today. Xandria has obviously developed into something completely different, but the fundamental idea remains: connecting different kinds of metal with music that may have little or nothing to do with metal, without worrying whether the result still obeys a particular genre definition. That freedom is probably the greatest pleasure I have as a songwriter. Music becomes a playground where I can follow whatever creates that spark in me – whether it is a modern riff, a Celtic melody, a pop chorus, a film-score passage or something I cannot even name yet. Wildhoney was the album that first showed me you were allowed to do that.

4. If you could call in any one collaborator to do a song with, who would it be, and why?

David Gilmour. His solo in “Comfortably Numb” is, to me, the greatest guitar solo in history – not because it is the most technically spectacular, but because of what it does emotionally within that song. He wrote the music, so the solo does not feel like something added on top of it. It feels like the song is finally breaking open and saying everything that could no longer be expressed in words. That kind of playing is incredibly rare. Every note has weight and tells the story. Writing a song with him and then hearing his guitar enter that song would probably be the most overwhelming musical collaboration I could imagine. I think I would spend the entire session trying to behave professionally while internally being six years old again and wanting to join ABBA. Although, if John Williams offered to write the orchestral arrangement for that same song, I would probably have to cheat slightly on the premise of this question and secretly add him to the collaboration as well…

5. What is your favorite activity when out of the studio and/or not on tour?  What do you like to do to unwind?

What I value most is spending time with old friends and family. Touring and making albums can consume almost your entire world for long periods, so it is grounding to be with people who have known you long before any of this and who do not particularly care what position your album reached in the charts. Apart from that, I unwind in fairly normal ways. I watch films, read books and play computer games. I would love to give you a wonderfully eccentric answer involving falconry or restoring medieval clocks, but the truth is that sometimes the greatest luxury is simply sitting at home, disappearing into another story and not having to make a decision about a guitar riff, a tour schedule, or an email.

6. How would you describe your music to someone who’d never listened to you before? What is the one comparison a reviewer or fan has made that made you cringe or you disagreed with?

We combine many different kinds of metal and rock with film-score elements and use all of that to tell stories. A Xandria album should feel like a journey through an entire universe of different musical worlds. One song may be huge, dark and cinematic, the next more intimate, playful or melodic. There should always be something new to discover, for the listener, but also for us while we are creating it. That is really the heart of Xandria. We want the music to remain exciting. We keep looking for combinations, sounds and ideas that give us that feeling of entering somewhere we have not been before. Genre boundaries are not the basis from which we start writing. If a song needs a modern metal riff, a Celtic melody, a pop chorus, classical vocals, a children’s choir or a passage that feels like a film score, then that is what belongs there. The only important thing is that it feels genuine and serves the song. That also leads directly to the comparisons that sometimes make me cringe. It is not necessarily being compared to a particular band. A comparison to a great band can be flattering when somebody genuinely hears a connection in the songwriting, the ambition or the emotional scope. What bothers me is when the comparison consists entirely of the most obvious ingredients: female vocals, orchestration, choirs and metal guitars. At that point, everything that actually gives the music its identity has been erased – the songwriting, the riffs, the very different influences and the individual world of each song. Labels can be useful as a rough orientation. But when someone hears those few elements and decides they already know exactly what the music is, the label has replaced the listening. And that is not only frustrating for us. It is also a shame for the listener, because they may be closing the door on most of what is actually there.

7. When your band is hanging out together, who cooks, who gets the drinks in, and who is first to crack out the acoustic guitars for a singalong?

Most of our time together naturally happens when we are on tour, recording or shooting videos, and we genuinely enjoy spending that time together. On tour, we often go out for dinner, look for a good local restaurant and try the food of whichever country or city we happen to be in. If we have enough time, we also like visiting cultural sites, museums or other places worth seeing. There is no official band chef, although somebody may occasionally make sandwiches or burgers for everyone in the morning, and sometimes we improvise a little barbecue with whatever interesting things we have found in the local shops. Getting the drinks is similarly democratic: whoever notices that something is missing usually takes care of it. We do not usually pull out an acoustic guitar in the evening, but music still plays a big part when we sit together after a show. We take turns choosing songs to play, and finding something that everyone enjoys, or something surprising that nobody else would ever have expected, is part of the fun. And once the right song comes on, singing along is sometimes unavoidable.

8. When was the last time you were starstruck and who was it?

Probably when we had the honour of playing a couple of shows as special guests for KK’s Priest in May 2024 and I met KK Downing. You try to behave like a reasonably normal and professional person, of course, but at the same time you are very aware that you are talking to someone who helped create a large part of heavy metal history. So there was definitely a moment inside my head that kept saying: “That is actually KK Downing standing in front of you.” What made the experience especially nice was how friendly and down-to-earth he was. We had some genuinely lovely conversations after the shows, and there was none of the distance you might expect from somebody with that kind of career and legacy.

9. What is the best part of being a musician? If you could no longer be a musician for whatever reason, what would be your dream job?

One of the greatest parts is that music allows you to travel to places you might otherwise never see and connect with people whose lives and cultures may be very different from your own. If you are fortunate enough to find an audience for what you create, you get to share something as universal as music with people all over the world. We genuinely love discovering other countries, and the most rewarding part is seeing music bring all those different people together for one evening. If I could no longer be a musician, purely hypothetically, I would probably have loved to become an evolutionary biologist. Evolution fascinates me because it explains so much more than how life developed. It is a fundamental principle that can help us understand behaviour, culture and even much broader processes in nature. I would love to spend my life discovering more about how the world became what it is.

10. What is one question you have always wanted an interviewer to ask – and what is the answer? Conversely, what question are you tired of answering?

I honestly do not have one particular question that I have always been waiting for. The best questions are usually the ones I could not have predicted – when somebody has really listened to the album, noticed something very specific and wants to understand why it is there. So perhaps the question I would most like to hear is simply one that makes me think: “That is interesting. Nobody has ever noticed that before.” My answer would depend on what the journalist discovered. I think interviews are at their best when they become an actual conversation rather than a list of questions that could have been sent to any band. The question I am tired of is probably: “Tell us about the new album.” That is not really an interview question. Of course I can describe the album, but the press release already does that. Ask me why a certain song suddenly changes direction, why a particular sound is there, what a lyric means or which idea almost did not make it onto the record. That is where the interesting stories begin.

11. Looking back over your career, is there a single moment or situation you feel was a misstep or you would like to have a “do over,” even if it didn’t change your current situation?

I think what I would really have wished for much earlier is for the band to be what it is today: a place where I can fully develop my musical vision, where collaboration strengthens that vision, and where compromises are enriching rather than painful. I also make the important business decisions myself now instead of relying too heavily on people outside the band to understand what is best for it. That gives me a clarity and freedom I did not always have in the past. But I also know that I could probably not have built things this way when I was a young musician starting my first serious band. You simply do not yet have the experience to understand every structure, every responsibility and every trap waiting along the way. Looking back, I would hold on to that creative freedom much more firmly and recognise earlier when compromise was no longer improving the music, but pulling it away from what it was meant to be. There was frustration, and there was pain, and of course I would gladly spare my younger self some of both. I would have loved to arrive here sooner – but I am not sure there was a shortcut.

12. If you could magically go back in time and be a part of the recording sessions for any one record in history, which would you choose – and what does that record mean to you?

I would probably choose Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Not because I would presume to improve anything – I would be perfectly happy sitting quietly in a corner and watching it happen. I would love to see how all those very different ideas found their way onto the same album: progressive and psychedelic rock, blues, electronic experiments, tape loops, sound effects, long atmospheric passages and, suddenly, a soul singer taking over the lead voice in “The Great Gig in the Sky.” On paper, that could easily have become a mere collection of interesting experiments. Instead, everything belongs to the same world, and every unusual idea makes that world more vivid. That is what the album means to me: musical freedom without losing emotion, atmosphere or identity. It showed how far a rock album could travel while still feeling completely whole. That idea has stayed with me ever since. Eclipse is obviously its own musical world, even though the Pink Floyd influence does surface in places – most clearly in “The Last Generation,” with its sparse piano-and-voice opening, defiant children’s choir and a guitar solo that openly carries some of that Gilmour spirit. But as a whole, Eclipse of course draws from a much wider universe of music that has emerged since The Dark Side of the Moon: all kinds of metal, classic rock, pop, Celtic music, modern production and, of course, film scores. For me, an album should be a place where all of those influences can meet and become something new, rather than a collection of songs designed to remain safely inside one genre. That is what I hope listeners discover in Eclipse: not only references they may recognise, but an entire musical world that keeps opening further the deeper they enter it.

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Category: Interviews