Renegades (Equilibrium album)

Renegades is the sixth studio album by German folk metal band Equilibrium. It is also the first album featuring the band's new clean male vocalist and bassist Martin Berger (Skar Productions) and the new keyboardist Skadi Rosehurst.

It was produced from September 2018 to March 2019.

Music and lyrics
The album, while maintaining some of their signature epic, folk metal roots, sees the band adopting more electronic and modern elements, including clean vocals. Guitarist, leader and main songwriter René Berthiaume commented:

Musically it is a typical Equilibrium album, but we have a lot of new elements included. We have more modern stuff but still keep the folkish melodies and of course the gross screams and heavy guitars, but we introduce more modern elements like electronic sounds and also the clean vocals.

The lyrics on the album deal with personal themes, in contrast with the German mythology topics that would be addressed before. Also, the album is almost entirely sung in English. According to Berthiaume:

We just felt that we have done enough about fantasy things and tales in the past and with so much going on in the world nowadays we thought it would be nice to put it to music. [...] we only have one song with German lyrics and that is because that particular song is a little more old school so the German lyrics fit better. All of the other songs sound more modern so we felt English was more suitable. Of course, the other side is more people can understand and speak English over German and we really like people to understand what we are singing about.

The digipak edition of the album comes with a bonus disc containing 8-bit versions of all the songs.

Personnel

 * Robert "Robse" Dahn – vocals
 * Martin "Skar" Berger – bass, clean vocals
 * René "Berthammer" Berthiaume – guitar
 * Dom R. Crey – guitar
 * Skadi Rosehurst – keyboards
 * Tuval "Hati" Refaeli – drums

Technical staff
 * Robin Leijon - production, mixing
 * Mike Kalajian - mastering

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