Known for its powerful sound and symphonic influences, Enemy of Reality recently released the song ‘Den se thelo pia’ (I Don’t Want You Anymore). Steelianos Amoiridis, Iliana Tsakiraki and Thanos Murrika are seen performing in this still from the music video.
“Den se thelo pia” (I Don’t Want You Anymore) offered the perfect canvas for transforming a classic rebetiko song into something darker and more modern. “We weren’t just going for a remake with major interventions in the harmony and orchestration, but also introduced melodic paraphrases so that it would sound like it’s never sounded before, while still respecting the original,” says Steelianos Amoiridis, a musician with the homegrown heavy metal band that recently released the new version of the song.
Enemy of Reality was formed in 2013 and has since earned a reputation for its powerful sound and the way it incorporates influences from classical and symphonic music. In its most recent release, it has replaced the acoustic guitar, oud and saz with electric guitar, bass and drums in a successful marriage of two seemingly incongruous genres that resonates equally with metalheads and rebetiko diehards.
At 120 years old and actually regarded as “pre-rebetiko,” “Den se thelo pia” is one of the oldest songs in the rebetiko canon. It has been treated to countless variations, including a gypsy jazz version performed in the United States. It is, nevertheless, regarded as a quintessentially Greek song even though its roots lie in Smyrna and Asia Minor and it originally evolved from an Italian canzonetta.
“I believe that ‘grafting’ different genres and influences is how music effectively evolves,” says Amoiridis, pointing to a strong trend in the Greek music scene. “There’s no need for labels; the nature of artistic output entails the creator’s memories, which stem from the music that shaped their sound,” adds the band’s drummer, Philip Stone.
Enemy of Reality is not consumed by the need to appear original; this is just something that happens through hard work. The philosophy that brings this group of musicians together, they say, can be summed up in the lyrics by fellow metal band Nevermore: “We are the nothing grating against the norm, we are the something that will not conform.”
The music video for “Den se thelo pia,” which was released just a few days ago, is different from most of the band’s previous work, but maintains the overall spirit of this philosophy, showing the band in a studio, where folklorish elements are injected into the clothes and decor. “Downfall” and “Needle Bites,” in contrast, were decidedly darker and more stagey. All of their work, however, has a powerful element of storytelling, inspired by ancient Greek literature, history and mythology.
Their first album, “Rejected Gods,” for example, is based on the myth of Orpheus and Euridyce, “Arakhne” is inspired by the mythical character of the same name, and “Where Truth May Lie” is set in a fictional ancient Greek period.
Even though most of the band’s songs are in English, “Den se thelo pia” is not the first time that singer Iliana Tsakiraki has performed in Greek. In May 2021, she gave us “Tin patrida pou echasa” (The Homeland I Lost), with lyrics by Christos Antoniadis, which was released to mark the Pontian Genocide.
“If we feel the need to talk about a specific issue that is expressed better through Greek verse, we’ll do it again, but this is certainly not a fixed recipe for us,” says the singer when asked whether Enemy of Reality will be doing something similar with other rebetiko or laiko songs in the future.
