DEATHSTARS singer-guitarist Andreas Bergh – a.k.a Whiplasher – is looking forward to touring Australia for more than one reason.

“We are really looking forward to the Australian weather,” he says. “It has been the longest winter here! Also, we haven’t played club gigs in probably three years; we’ve mainly been doing festivals and arenas, and just to hang out with the guys in the band and play the songs will be nice.”

Having a distinctive look and being labelled as ‘death glam’ hasn’t stopped Deathstars branching out.

“We have always been a pretty straightforward rock band, even though the music is big-sounding and heavy,” he says. “We look up to bands like Iggy and the Stooges and MC5 and people like that, so it’s more like that vibe these days, but there’s also a flamboyant side to us. There’s a contradiction in Deathstars; we have one foot in the black metal scene in the graveyards of Sweden, and then we have a glam side, as we grew up with bands like Kiss. It’s most important for us in the band to not be able to say what Deathstars really is; we like to leave a question mark behind it.”

The band recently celebrated ten years together and completed a European tour with metal titans Rammstein.

“Watching Rammstein was incredible,” he says. “I think it was the biggest indoor production last year, and it was over 700,000 audience members in total. When we started out it was like an experiment; it was just finding something new that was interesting for us with the influences we had. Today, we’ve grown a lot, and it’s much more relaxed. We could be pretty stressed, but now we don’t really think about it. It’s a more peaceful band to be in now, although it’s still a circus all the time. And we have new members now, so when we make our new album after the Australian shows it’ll be as just a four piece, without Cat on guitar. We are starting to record it as soon as we get back home. We’re quite slow with releasing albums.”

Deathstars last toured here in 2009, and Bergh hopes to have a similar experience this time around.

“It was a hazy, but great time,” he says. “Our music is very Scandinavian, very European, and you can see that that scene exists and people appreciate that kind of vibe in Australia; it’s really not that far between us.”

DEATHSTARS PLAY THE ZOO MAY 1