You’ve come a long way to this album. You recorded it in 2006, but you haven't published it until now. Why this four-year delay?

It wasn't four, it was ten. Ten years ago we released a split, an album made up of three bands: Adhur, the Black Moon and the Forest of the Ayunas. There is a relationship between the three groups and some of the members of the Aiume Forest who also work in Ilbelz. And, the thing is, we already had these songs that we have presented now, but we preferred to publish the old songs earlier. Then we had a lot of changes between the members of the band and so in ten years we have been finding musicians who would stay with us with the elaboration of the songs.

You combine folk and extreme metal. I don't know if any other group around here does that... Don't you feel like you're a special team?

Whoever hears it will have to say it, but well, one way or another it will. It is true that in the songs some parts are of one extreme and go to the opposite extreme: black metal, viking or pagan metal on the one hand, and folk on the other. We like the music we like that way. It is true that many black metal bands do not listen to other styles, and the same with many folk bands. On the other hand, we try to have a lot of references: Basque folk groups, foreigners, black metal groups... The latter has not been overworked in the Basque Country, but abroad. And the union of folk and metal as we do is also not uncommon in Norway or Finland.

In Europe perhaps the metal has more followers in all its variants. What happens in the Basque Country, where this audience is still to be created?

I don't understand how this world of music works. This year’s concert was pretty bad. Look at how many concerts have been given and what style. And with things like that, I don’t know if people are willing to bet on other options. However, in our case, many people have told us that our audience is not what they expected: The fact that 40-year-olds go to a black metal concert is strange to many.

And they're leaving?

Oh, yeah, yeah. We have managed to get people who like folk to come to our concerts and also like black metal. With this you also risk: what we do can be too soft for black metal lovers, and pure noise for folk lovers...

You would also have had some headaches when composing the songs, caused by this difference in style.

That’s ten years, he laughed. The songs were created ten years ago, but the vocal parts or instruments we have added have been worked on over time.

The title of the album reflects how difficult it is for you to complete the work: Down the rough road of the past.

It has two meanings: on the one hand, it seeks to reflect the abrupt path that the Basque Country has lived in the past; and on the other hand, we wanted to point out that the path that we have followed in the musical world has also been abrupt. So when this title came out, we said: “That’s two important things in our lives.”

I had that feeling with the songs. You often use Basque mythology, but you talk about the Basque Country today, don’t you?

In a way, yes. But in the Basque Country many groups come out in words doing it directly with politics or social issues. Our words are actually fantasy. Sometimes they are based on real events, for example the song Fuego de Akelarrea talks about the Inquisition and its impact on the Basque Country, especially those who considered themselves pagan. Or, the song Gentle Blood talks about the beliefs that existed in... But we also have those that are pure fantasy. For example, the song about an arlekin closes the album and has nothing to do with Basque mythology.

You tend to tell stories, and I'd say you've got a pretty good narrative album.

Some songs have nothing to do with others. The song "Guilt in Cantabrian Work" speaks about the sea. We're from Mutriku, and both Mutriku and Deba have been pretty pirate towns. We were interested in the looting that took place in the marine world at that time. We thought to ourselves: “It’s a thing of our country, and with the introduction of a slightly epic melody with a medieval touch, it could look good.” But in general we don’t have a fixed point of view in words.

You have seven friends and you have many collaborators. How do you manage to show all this in a concert?

We’ve been working directly at seven so far and we hope that we can continue to manage so that we can all work together. In the studio we have included oboes, flutes, other wind instruments, tambourine, applause... etc, but we decided not to take them to the live. We try to give these melodies with other instruments and also, I think, that it has a good part of it, because we try to give it something else directly and, depending on what and in what cases, it can be better than the album. And it happens to us, taking the record and saying: “If we had recorded this part as we do it live...”