News

Within Temptation To Release A Series Of Short Films

• 31st Jan 2011

With great anticipation, rock fans around the world are looking forward to 5pm CET, January 31 when Within Temptation will reveal the first of 3 short films on link and link.

These movies give further insight into the concept of the band’s fifth studio album “The Unforgiving” and are based on the comic storyline; the characters are impersonated by actors. Each film is followed by a band performance that, all together, form a dark and compelling tale of life, love, revenge, rage, and regret.

The first movie, titled “Mother Maiden”, ties in with the band’s first single & video for ‘Faster’, introducing the main characters of the narrative. British actress Dawn Mastin (Tom & Thomas, Down) performs the lead role.

Within Temptation fans who share the “Mother Maiden” short film via their social network on Facebook or Twitter using a “pay-with-a-tweet” application, supplied on the band’s various sites, will not only receive a brand new Within Temptation wallpaper in return but have exclusive access to an online listening party for the album pre-release.

SYNOPSIS of “The Unforgiving” short film series:
A powerful medium, Mother Maiden recruits lost souls to be part of her wraith taskforce to fight evil in all its forms. What better way to hunt serial killers than to use killers? Their servants are culled from genuinely remorseful souls; ones who may not have been cold-blooded killers, but those who did in turn take a life and are deeply sorry for their sins. Guilt can be a powerful motivator…and redemption, even greater. They each carry a specific guilt about something they did in their lives. Mother Maiden offers them an opportunity to “make right what is wrong” by giving them missions and assignments to hunt down evil as a penance for their previous sins.

Within Temptation, led by charismatic front woman Sharon den Adel, has purposefully moved away from the windswept fantasies of previous albums for the new record. “The Unforgiving” is their first conceptual album and is based on the storyline of a comic written by Steven O’Connell (BloodRayne/Dark 48) and illustrated by Romano Molenaar (Witchblade/Darkness/X-Men). The comic consists of a prequel and 6 episodes which will be published every 2 months throughout 2011.

In addition to the comic, these 3 short movies the band has produced will be released on a bonus DVD with the special edition of the album, alongside a documentary about the film production process.

“The Unforgiving” is the bands most diverse album to date, a dazzling tour-de-force of state-of-the-art hard rock, gleaming pop melodies, razor-sharp arrangements, and powerful, shadow-shrouded atmospheres; “The Unforgiving” is quite unlike any previous Within Temptation album. Every one of its 12 tracks boasts a huge, instantly memorable melody, and yet there is enormous diversity and versatility on display here, as the band move skilfully from the instant thrills of the anthemic ‘Shot In The Dark’, the blissfully metallic ‘In The Middle Of The Night’, and the soaring menace of first single ‘Faster ‘, through to the epic bombast of ‘Iron’, the exhilarating drama of ‘Where Is The Edge’ and the irresistible disco thump of ‘Sinéad’.

“We didn’t want to make a traditional concept album where you just make up a story and write lyrics to tell the tale,” explains guitarist Robert Westerholt. “What we’ve always done in the past when we read a book or saw a movie, is that it inspires us to write a lyric or a song, and that’s how we wanted to approach this. We have 12 tracks and they’re soundtracks to the story. “In a strange way, it also felt like we were getting back to our roots on this album,” he notes. “We come from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, that’s our musical birthplace. You always want to do something new, but we also went back to that time and embraced it”.

“The Unforgiving” album will be released on March 28, 2011.