First of all, congratulations for your new album, it’s an amazing start of the new year with excellent doom – death metal, will you please tell us the story of the band, how it all start? 
Hello, thank you for support sending us this interview and for the kind words about “The Withering”. Well, the band started out in September 2005, because a couple of months earlier I, Juanma B, quit from the band I was playing for, Forensick, a brutal death metal act, and I decided to change the style to my other major musical inspiration, the doom metal, so I asked the bass player of Forensick, Raúl A. to join me in this new adventure, find a drummer and on the first rehearsal, Jorge A. came in as he was friend of the drummer. After that, we looked for a singer, and a female vocalist was added. After a demo and some successful gigs, I took the duty of vocals and that’s how the actual “career” of In Loving Memory was born. We recorded a couple of albums, changed line-up, and that’s how we got into 2022 with “The Withering”.

How was received your previous album “Negation Of Life”, by the fans and the media? 
Very well indeed. It was quite a success having in mind that our first album was very unknown outside our frontiers. We signed to Bad Moon Man Music (Solitude Productions) and that opened us a global market.

For that album you have done an amazing video for the song “Negation Of Life”, can you tell us the story behind it?. 
The bass player on that album, Raúl A., is a fan of old movies so when we were looking for someone who could make us a video for the song, he decided to try mixing old movie clips with some live shots of the band. “Negation Of Life” was the very first time I decided to record some clean vocals on an album, and in that song, with some catchy riffs and melodic cleans in the middle part was the one we chose to represent our style in the best way with a video clip.

Why do we have to wait 8 years for this new album to be released?. 
In 2015, after a big line up change in which only Jorge A. (guitars), Alberto D. (keyboards) and I (guitars and vocals) remained, we decided to start writing new music from scratch. We composed & recorded 13 songs, our computer with all the music crashed, so we needed to start again. Meanwhile we had a lot of personal matters that keep us away from music. Then, when we had all recorded and made some mixes by ourselves, the current pandemic explode, so another year of delay due restrictions. Then we found an studio to make the final mix and master, then look for record labels, and wait 6 months to be released….yeah, almost 8 years 

What themes do this new album approach, can you tell us something about every song? 
When we started to think about the theme for “The Withering” after we had the guidelines for the music, back in 2016, Jorge A. came with the idea of all the ways the mankind could be exterminated from this planet, so we decided to make one song for every possibility of that extermination: a major earthquake (“Fractured”), an inversion of magnitc fields of the Earth (“The Reversal”), an giant asteroid impacting the globe (“The Dance of The Moons”), a global pandemic (“Dawn Of Misery”), the sun blackout (“Sun Of Ebony”), a vast black hole (“Stellar Runaway”), etc.

The production is also very good, how was the time spent in the studio?. 
Well, the time at the studio was minimal, only for the final mix and master. We recorded all the instrument and voices by ourselves and make a pre-mix, so that way we could afford some money and have all the time we needed to change every note, without the pressure of the clock running at the studio.

How will you promote this new album? 
Our label, Funere, sent some music to media for the reviews and interviews. We also did 3 video-lyrics and also had help for a 4th one….and that’s all. Our main promotion is people speaking about the record with their friends. We are a very underground band under an underground label and we won’t use PR services or Media Promoters. We think that is not the good way to do things…maybe the quicker, but not the true old-style. We want to be known because people listens to the music and likes it, not because they see a lot of ads and super-fancy pictures or videos in the social media platforms/magazines, as some bands do.

What hobbies do you have except music? 
Well, various ones, some of us enjoy watching movies and TV series, other like sports, travelling, spending time with their pets, etc, but our common and main hobby is the music. It is our passion

The cover illustration is interesting, who’s ideas were and the meaning?. 
I did all the artwork for all the covers of our albums, photo sessions, gig posters, etc. The idea behind this cover is the same as the theme for “The Withering”…the end of mankind in several ways, and there are reflected, in various and subtle ways, the theme of every song or the lyrics themselves….the reversal is the clock in the middle of the cover. That’s why it not represented in the right way. The background with all the stars is for “Stellar Runaway”. The roots in the faces is for the lyric of “Martyrdom of Light”. The glassy sky look is for “Translucid Remains”. The color around the clock goes for “Sun Of Ebony”, etc.

In the end we hope to see you in a concert in our country Romania in the near future, you have the final words for all our readers. 
We also would like to play in Romania in the near future. We’d be honored to be in your beautiful country. We would like to salute every one of your readers and invite them to listen to “The Withering” and decide for themselves if they like it or not. Don’t wait until someone tells you about it. Discover it by yourself. You can do it free at our Bandcamp (ilm.bandcamp.com) or Funere’s (funere.bandcamo.com). We also have it for free listen at YouTube, it’s on Spotify and other major digital platforms. We also wanted to thank you for this opportunity of sharing some of our souls with you and your readers.
 
Interview by Ionut Dimitriev / Answer by Juanma Blanco

January 2022