Heretofore mostly urban/hip-hop label Koch Records solidified its foray into the world of metal this week by signing the legendary Swedish metallers In Flames for their forthcoming album A Sense of Purpose. In Flames is signed to Nuclear Blast for most of the world, but typically licenses each album out for American release. I’m interested to know why the band opted not to re-up with Ferret who did a fantastic job with their previous release Come Clarity, rescuing the band from critical oblivion. Ferret pushed the release past the 100,000 sales mark in America, a first for the band, and Anders vocally thanked Ferret for doing such a great job on multiple occasions.
Koch has gradually ventured into metal over the past couple of years, but previous signings included mostly b-rate retreads or otherwise unknowns, such as Otep, Within Chaos, Circus Diablo and Straight Line Stitch (the one exception being Horse the Band, who, for better or worse, are pretty fucking original sounding). But the signing of In Flames represents a serious push forward and something of a badge of legitimacy for Koch; In Flames will be their marquee metal band, to say the least.
How did they do it? I’d have to guess they ponied up a much larger advance than Ferret or anyone else was willing to offer, whatwith Koch’s bigger corporate infrastructure as backing. From the band’s standpoint this makes sense, but I’m hard pressed to figure out how the label is going to best the sales numbers of Come Clarity. I can’t imagine Koch’s marketing machine is — for a metal release — as finely tuned and well-oiled as Ferret’s. On the other hand, the groundwork has already been laid on someone else’s dime. I guess we’ll see?
-VN
