Formed in 2001 to play only ONE show, it was only after the audience response that EQUILIBRIUM decided to commit to a career as a band. Circulating a demo in 2003, they signed a deal with Black Attakk and released their debut album, Turis Fratyr, three years later. Since their inception, their brand of symphony-infused folk metal also had qualities of pagan and black metal. Exposure from performances at the Wacken Open Air and Summer Breeze festivals in Europe created a larger fan-base for them despite the fact that all their song lyrics are in German (!). With the recent rise in the awareness and popularity of pagan/folk metal trail blazed by the likes of Ensiferum (formed in Finland in 1995), Finntroll (Finland, 1997), Turisas (Finland, 1997), Eluveitie (Switzerland, 2002), and Korpiklaani (Finland, 2003), EQUILIBRIUM signed with Nuclear Blast to expand the reach of their music.

Much like the pride behind the Reinheitsgebot purity law established by the Duke of Bavaria in 1516 (which states only three ingredients are ever allowed in beer: water, barley, and hops), the song titles on EQUILIBRIUM’s Nuclear Blast debut, Sagas, showcase a purer, poetically aged, and more romantic version of the German language. Raised amidst unspoiled natural surroundings, medieval castles, small towns, and baroque cathedrals, each band member’s influences are never far from reach. With lyrical themes of Germanic folklore, rural landscapes, and mythology, each song builds a bridge to the distant past through a musical expression clearly inspired by their individual and collective heritage.

Like the prose narratives of achievements documenting heroic exploits and historic events, the musical roots of Sagas reach deep into the soils of the past to inform the musical histories of metal’s future.