Alkerdeel: "We wanted to create dirty music."
NOIRE: Hi Alkerdeel, can you introduce yourselves to my readers?
Alkerdeel: Hello, and thanks for having us. We're Alkerdeel, an extreme metal band from the Ghent area in Belgium, active for over 20 years now. Our roots are in black metal, but we don't confine ourselves to it. We draw from punk, crust, doom, krautrock, psychedelia and even noise and electronics, from Darkthrone and Ildjarn to Burning Witch, Corrupted and Merzbow.
We've released De Speenzalvinge (At War With False Noise / Babylon Doom Cult Records), Morinde (At War With False Noise / Consouling Sounds), Lede (Consouling Sounds) and Slonk (Consouling Sounds / Babylon Doom Cult Records), as well as a split with A Den Of Robbers and a collaboration album with Gnaw Their Tongues, Dyo Dyo Asema.
NOIRE : Your band name, "Alkerdeel", means "Manure Spreader" or "Shit Spreader". Why did you want to call your band that? Why did you want to create the band in the first place?
Alkerdeel: We love old dialect words, and "Alkerdeel" seemed like a fun one. We live in a rural area, and the word is known almost exclusively by older people. It has the same ring as the Scandinavian band names we grew up with. While those are mostly negative in concept, ours is actually positive: shit makes the soil fertile. We liked that contradiction.
The band didn't start out with any real ambition. Around 2005, we started jamming in a garage, right next to a lawn mower. We shared a frustration: most of the bands we saw at local gigs played technical death metal, or worse, metalcore. The music we loved, second wave black metal, doom, sludge and the like, was nowhere to be heard. Starting something ourselves seemed a far more constructive approach than complaining. The only rule was that it had to be "dirty" music, not limited to a genre.
The project was first called Dark Torre, a reference to Darkthrone, "torre" being a dialect word for "fart". Again, very mature. Or rather, manure. It was never meant to be serious. After our first gig, one long song made of Ildjarn and Darkthrone parts and our own material, which alienated about 75% of the audience but got great feedback from the people who mattered to us, things got a little more serious and we changed the name to Alkerdeel. The rest is history.
NOIRE : What is the essence of your music in your vision?
Alkerdeel: Only live is real. No tricks. That's probably the core of it. Think of the old blues recorded with a single mic: primitive and hollow, it sounds crappy, but it's honest. A band like Wulkanaz has the same core, and so does Meth Drinker: one from the forest, the other from the New Zealand suburbs, miles apart, but both misanthropic and both without tricks. We've seen many bands live that couldn't recreate the sound of their albums on stage. To us, those bands aren't sincere.
At the same time, we're more interested in things that aren't there. Subtones. Things happening in the gutter. The smelly mud that gets squeezed through the ribs of your shoe soles when you walk through the fields. That's where the wall of sound comes from. And we record live, all in one room, in as few takes as possible, so what you hear is what we are. You sound how you sound.
Many bands we love pretend to live a certain life or follow an ideology that's just an image for entertainment, or they don't have a clue what they're talking about. Our music is intense, but we don't pretend to be nihilistic, satanic misanthropes. I think our intention is a positive one: bringing forth energy, like the eruption of a volcano. Letting ourselves and the listener feel alive, like jumping out of a plane and realising you forgot your parachute. I think that's our essence.
NOIRE : Do you consider yourselves an experimental band?
Alkerdeel: We've never really thought about ourselves in those terms. What we can say is that we don't follow rules, and we never wanted to become a tribute or cover band of the influences we wear on our sleeves. We're aware we're not reinventing the wheel, but we do try a different approach to the music we like. Everyone in Alkerdeel listens to a wide range of music, from extreme metal and eclectic outsider music to pop, folk and electronics. Good music in general.
As for experimenting, an example: in the early days, the vocals were run through a Memory Man delay pedal, and noise sneaked into the first two albums. People sometimes don't hear the influences we mention. Dälek, for example, a dark industrial hip hop act, had an influence on Hessepikn. For the intro of Slonk, we asked the krautrock band Stadt to compose something, with Neptune Towers, Pink Floyd, Jean Michel Jarre and a street singer from Prague as reference points. Our friends in Lugubrum showed us that anything is possible, that there are no real constraints, musically or conceptually. If that makes us experimental, fine. But we don't do it to be different. We just do our own thing.
NOIRE : How has your sound evolved since the beginning of your career?
Alkerdeel: We started as a jam band, recording improvisations on a dictaphone, with no real lyrics, just phonetic outbursts. Our debut, De Speenzalvinge, is our most rural and primitive album. Morinde found a balance between black, doom and sludge, and people expected us to explore that sludge side further. So we went the other way. On Lede, there's no trace of sludge left: the aggression came to the front, with more old school influences like Von, Bestial Warlust, Archgoat, Parabellum and the death metal of My Dying Bride's demo.
With Slonk, the same thing happened. People expected us to get even more brutal, and although it's still quite aggressive, an atmospheric element reappeared. Maybe touring with Turia had something to do with it, as it brought back music we grew up with but never highlighted: early In The Woods, the Fleurety demos, Forgotten Woods. We're currently writing the new album. I think it's about 75% finished, and it will probably be our most eclectic work so far. No AC/DC repetition in sight.
NOIRE : How do you work on your compositions?
Alkerdeel: Honestly, we find reading about the writing process of an album mostly very uninteresting, so we'll keep it short. It all goes back to how we started: improvising, riff after riff, with drums and vocals following along. Not free jazz improvisation, just riffs. Then we butcher, cut and paste parts until a song starts to take shape. These days, we rehearse in a barn at our guitarist's farm, the old cow stable. Rehearsals usually start in the evening with a drink around the table, and if there's still time and motivation left, we pick up our instruments. That probably explains the long gaps between albums.
NOIRE : I had the chance to see you on stage at Tyrant Fest 2025. I was totally hypnotized by your music that day. What are your memories of this particular event?
Alkerdeel: Thank you, that's great to hear. We remember the impressive architecture of the venue and the warm hospitality of both the audience and the organisers. Climbing the terril, the old slag heap next to the venue, was fun too. We actually haven't played that much in France: a couple of times in Lille, Rock in Bourlon (a festival close to our hearts) and Dijon. So we were happy to play Tyrant Fest. It's a bit strange that there's so little connection between the French and B.
NOIRE : The Lede music video uses an old movie named Ce cochon danseur, and your covers often represent animals. Is Alkerdeel founding a little zoo? Why do you like to link animals to your music?
Alkerdeel: A little zoo, maybe, but a rather rural one. We don't hide our agricultural surroundings: we rehearse in an old cow stable on a farm, and the animals on the cover of Slonk can all be found in the wide fields around it. Morinde, the title of our second album, is actually the dialect word for the Muscovy duck, and the cover shows one fighting a wolf. The cover of De Speenzalvinge is the inside of a frog, cut open on a cardboard plate, which we found in an old encyclopedia.
Our inspiration comes from old children's books, fables and illustrators like Anton Pieck and Arthur Rackham. The comic in Lede nods to Les Fables De La Fontaine, the fox and the crow. Wolves and foxes that walk upright return in the Morinde artwork and in the clip for Regardez Ses Yeux III. And there are recurring characters: the rat holding the pentagram from the Darkthrone logo on the Morinde vinyl label reappears in the Lede comic, feeding on blood. The mosquito from that comic links to the clip for Dyo Dyo Asema. Animals let us tell a story without saying it directly.
But there's more to it: the animal is also a metaphor for the devil, the wolf in man, or simply the beast we all still are. It's no coincidence that Christian iconography gave the devil horns and hooves borrowed from Pan, a pagan god of the fields and the wild, turning what was once sacred in nature into something to fear. Since Darwin, we know there's no real line between us and the animal, only a thin layer of civilisation we like to hide behind. An animal doesn't pretend or preach, it simply follows its nature, and that closeness to a pagan, earthly way of living is exactly what feels honest to us.
NOIRE : Your artistic vision is also very absurd or surreal. Belgium is part of the surrealism movement, and many artists from this movement, such as Magritte, come from this country. Do you relate to this artistic movement?
Alkerdeel: We wouldn't say we've studied the works of the Belgian surrealists, but Magritte's famous pipe, with the line "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" below it, explains a lot. You see the pipe, but the text makes you doubt. It shows that we humans can only cope with reality by describing it through symbols or language. We like things we can recognise and relate to. When we make music, we try to do the opposite. It's more interesting to hear things that aren't there. Subtones. Things happening in the gutter.
Surrealism has always been synonymous with anarchism: not following the rules, being a trickster. That's something we relate to, just like the trickster devil on the cover of "Lede". There's something very stubborn about Belgium. Some relate it to the fact that we've always been under foreign rule and served as the battlefield for other countries' wars: nodding to the big bosses, but in the end doing your own thing to survive.
NOIRE : Your last album came out in 2021. Are you currently working on new compositions? What are your next projects?
Alkerdeel: As mentioned, we're working on a new album, and have been for quite some time now. Life got a bit in the way, which explains why it's taking so long. But we've shifted gears: we decided to focus on writing and play fewer gigs for a while. We're aiming for next year!
Thanks to Alkerdeel for answering my questions.
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