KILL SCREEN 045: Francesco Cavalieri of WIND ROSE Fights for Realm and Glory

It feels impossible to overstate how popular video games have become, a fact that can even be lost on its most devoted of fans. After forming an alliance with Napalm Records in December 2018, folk/power metal hybrid Wind Rose got to work crafting what would be their label debut and fourth LP overall, set to be unearthed the following year. Though ready with a full slate of original material, it was the group’s cover of Warcraft– and Minecraft-flavored song “Diggy Diggy Hole,” originally performed by the Yogscast (a gaming-centric YouTube channel that currently has over 7 million subscribers), that was unveiled as the band’s lead single and music video for their new label home. Fronted by Francesco Cavalieri, a lifelong MMO warrior and today’s player character, the band was hesitant, but donned their Medieval garb and weaponry, leaning all the way into their fantasy dwarf associations to hammer out their own unique identity. The Italians struck proverbial gold, amassing nearly 60 million views at time of publication and moving from the opening slot of European tours to headlining around the world—“dwarven metal” was born. Striking while the iron is still hot, their upcoming album Trollslayer, due out on October 4, features the track “Rock and Stone”—an official nod to praised dwarven-themed FPS Deep Rock Galactic—to the immense delight of their fanbase.

Despite the fantastical nature of their lyrical focus and jovial nature of their live performances, high fantasy MMOs aren’t just fun and games to Cavalieri. The brawny vocalist attributes a lot of value to these titles due in part to early 2000s releases putting a strong emphasis on stat grinding, clan cooperation and hours-long play sessions that served as both a proving ground for his will and a direct source of lyrical inspiration. Despite a few current day titles hold his interest—they did just put out an anthem about Deep Rock Galactic—it’s the games of yore that he holds near and dear to his heart. As the era of the dwarves seems to be dawning over the power metal landscape, the co-nerds of Kill Screen team up with the head dwarf and dig into his gaming past.

What was your very first video game experience?
Probably something in the ’90s. Not a Nintendo 64, but probably something before that one. I don’t know if it was something related to Nintendo. I started with consoles. It was not so common to have online games at that time, not even Internet at all. I guess I started with consoles because they didn’t require any internet connection and then I switched to computer MMOs in 2001. When I got the 56k connection at home—super slow.

My most played game of my gamer history is Dark Age of Camelot. It’s an online game with three realms. You choose one realm and you fight for your realm and all the other players are around. The thing is that I was watching for the first 15 minutes the screen [hums the Dark Age of Camelot main theme, pantomimes spinning wheel] because my connection was so stupid. I was trying to connect to the server for 15 minutes and then the moment that I was logged in, I had, like, 10 minutes [left] because my maximum per day was 30 minutes per day, otherwise we were spending too much money. It was just the idea of gaming that was making me excited. [Laughs]

That sounds like you had a lot of hurdles, but you were still very excited. Why was that? What really made you that excited about it?
To be honest, I always really loved online gaming because it gives you the opportunity to connect with people with the same interests probably as you, and all around the world. For a kid raised in the ’80s, ’90s, and then doing this kind of stuff was like going into the future, novel for us. We’re probably the same age here, we are all 30 plus. Playing with someone from the U.S. or playing with someone from Latin America or playing with someone from China for me was something crazy. “Meeting” electronically, but meeting other people was something fantastic, you know?

So we were playing, farming, and that game required a lot of time for farming to arrive to the maximum level. I mean, the game was very good, but more than that, the time that you spent with the people farming, you were also talking with them on, for example, team speak at that time—we have Discord now. We were going on there to speak and we were talking with them and I was, like, 12 years old and it gave me the confidence to practice another language that is not my mother language: English. I basically learned how to talk on online games. For me, it was something crazy, to talk with people from the other side of the world. They told me their experiences and all this stuff. I love that.

I love the the community side of the game and also that game because it was very cool. You get a sort of affection to your realm or to your clan. A lot of friendships that I had in that game, they’re still there, for example on Facebook or on Instagram. People think, I want to play because I want to evade the real world. I want to be someone else. It’s true, but at the end, people will know the real you—not judging your physical aspect or your color or your religion. At the end, people will know what you are for real inside and that is the most important thing, no? If we were able in real life to meet people like they see themselves, we would be really glad to see instantly what they are. It’s fantastic, in my opinion. That’s what is most fascinating about online games. I also had some love stories in online games. Why not? I mean, we met obviously in real life after years. It’s cool.

What do you typically play these days? What are your games of choice?
Nowadays, mostly I play on computer. I usually play on a computer because you can play it everywhere if you have a laptop. Also, most of the games that I like are not multi-platform or cross-platform, so as long as all my friends play on a computer, I have to play on a computer as well. I’m playing mostly dungeon extractions, like Dark and Darker or Dungeonborne. They’re both pretty new games. It’s sort of like [Escape from] Tarkov, but fantasy. You choose a class, you spawn solo, duo or trio and then you have to loot and eventually fight other trios or other solos and then extract what you get. If you lose, you lose everything. If you win, you get all the stuff from the other players. This kind of game is the game of the year, let’s say, of 2024.

You mentioned Dark and Darker, how it’s like Tarkov, but with fantasy. That fantasy flavor, is that something that you seek in the games that you play, or are you comfortable playing something different, like sci-fi or more modern-style games?
I don’t like many sci-fi games. I can play a game that is based in current day, but in the future with starships and all this kind of stuff, I don’t like it that much. For some months, I played [Star Wars: The Old Republic]. There are so many games with starships and other stuff, but I don’t like the environment. I prefer classic fantasy games, like good versus evil.

But what I look for in a game for sure is PvP, because otherwise it gets old very quickly. One of the PvE games that I like most recently—let’s say in the last few years—is Deep Rock Galactic. We also wrote a song also about Deep Rock Galactic. I love it, but the thing is when I had no friends to play with, I was alone. You collect minerals and you kill mobs, but you are alone. So after one hour or so, you get tired and now you want to do something else because there’s no human interaction. But if it’s a PvP game, I mostly prefer to play alone because I’m a fucking piece of shit. [Laughs] I’m a snake. I’m the one who was waiting for you for, like, 20 minutes while you were looting something, to kill you while you are watching the inventory and then I get everything. I am the one that ruins your evenings when you’re back home after a long day of work: “Ah, now I get to play. Oh, I found this item! I need it! I’ve been looking for it for months!” And then up pops a fucking stealther, [mimics stabbing someone]. “Nooo!” [Laughs]

So you’re the reason why I [Michael] don’t like playing PvP games. [Laughs]
Yes, I’m a little bit toxic, it’s true. When I play online games, I’m a little bit toxic. I’m the one that kills you and teabags you. [Laughs] It’s not cool, but it’s part of the fun if you don’t take it personally. It’s nothing personal. You don’t know the other person, it’s just for fun. Especially when there is voice chat, that you can hear people talking in the surroundings, it’s the best because you hear them get super upset. This gives you the endorphins. [Laughs] Ah, yes! Someone got someone got mad at me, yes!

In a YouTube video a couple of years ago, your guitarist Claudio [Falconcini] listed his favorite games, and his top three included Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Xenoblade Chronicles and Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. Have you considered what your top three games of all time would be?
I never considered that, but considering now what I played most over the years probably would be… first of all, Dark Age of Camelot, like I said. Second one would probably be an FPS like Counter-Strike. It’s the FPS that I started with. It was version 1.47, the first version of Counter-Strike from 2000. And then I will say [The Elder Scrolls III:] Morrowind. It’s what brought me into into these kinds of games, Morrowind and then Skyrim. Oblivion and Skyrim, for me, they are the only single-player games that I played passionately, with the will to play them and to discover every single thing. So, I would say these games.

Oh, no, no, no, wait—I want to remove Counter-Strike because I like FPS, but I want to put another single-player game: Gothic. Gothic was a single-player game from Piranha Bytes. It’s a very good classic in my opinion. It’s very old-school. I don’t know if you know the game. It’s probably not running on computers nowadays. I played, like, 2 years ago and it was crashing every hour because it’s a very old game from ’99 or something. This game, the worlds, they wanted to make a barrier to protect the realm but they fucked up and they made this magical barrier like a capsule, a sort of sphere on this part of the of the world. You cannot get out, but the people outside were putting people inside this other world like a prison to make them work, et cetera. You start as a prisoner, “Welcome to the colony,” boom, they give you a punch and you fall inside the barrier and have to start your journey. You can talk with NPCs and everyone has a different story or something else to tell. Every NPC is killable, it depends on your gear. You can also get all the gear and kill everyone and then you are alone in the world. It’s super old-school. It depends 100 percent what you do to finish it or not to finish it. If you kill the wrong person, you cannot go for further. [Laughs] It’s very cool, in my opinion.

You had mentioned one of the benefits of playing computer games is that you can bring a laptop on the road. Do you get much gaming time while you’re on tour?
Last year I did, but not this year. When we started to play more headliners, we play more during the night, like, from 45 minutes to an hour and a half or more. It’s the difference and to me, it drained me more than before, so I preferred to rest during the latest tours that we made. In the last four months, we spent just two weeks at home. It’s very tiring to tour and I didn’t have the will to bring my laptop and then start playing something. I didn’t have the will. But if I get into something for real that I want to play, I will bring my laptop.

Is that something that you look forward to once you get off tour?
Yes. Online games give you the chance to stay in touch with people but doesn’t have the social pressure of how you dress or whatever, so you can stay comfy in your flip-flops at home and watch a film with your girlfriend or watch videos with your friends or play with your friends or whatever. In my experience, I have social batteries that I have to recharge because when you are on tour, you are constantly with a minimum four people if I’m in a room with my band. If I’m in a room or in the bus with everyone, I’m constantly with 11, 12 people or more and it’s tiring. I don’t want to talk. I arrive at some point that I don’t want to stay with anyone. I look for a couch in the corner just to stay by myself. It’s not easy to live with 10, 15 people for 4 months. You get tired. At times, you want to isolate yourself and just listen to some music without anyone asking you something.

It’s impossible to talk about Wind Rose without bringing up your cover of “Diggy Diggy Hole.” What’s the story behind Wind Rose’s version of the song?
People were requesting this song live between songs. They started randomly singing “Diggy Diggy Hole”—we are talking 2014. We always knew that our community, as long as they understood that we were talking about the dwarves in the songs, they were interested in this kind of stuff. So at some point we wanted to make a cover of this song and put it as a bonus track for the Japanese market. In the music industry, the Japanese market has different versions of the album. First of all, it’s all written in Japanese, and second, it has covers or other content inside the album to make it different from the European and American ones. We wanted to put it as a bonus track, but when our manager heard it and listened to the whole album, they said, “The strongest hit that you have is this one. We have to make it the first single on Napalm Records.” And we were like, “Come on, man. It’s not even one of our songs. It’s not important!”

This would be the ramp for our success, and it went exactly that way. The song went super viral, probably something that not many bands in our genre can say—60 million views on one video, but not just the views, the tone of the comments, of the shares. We also went on the BBC! I mean, it was crazy.

Were you surprised by not only the reaction of your fan base and the metal community, but also the video game community? Was this completely unexpected to you?
Unexpected? No, but I was not expecting the viral thing. I was expecting that this was a strong start because the song is catchy, it’s an earworm. You’ll sing it for, like, two weeks from the moment that you listen for the first time. Over the next few weeks, you will sing it every day or it will suddenly pop into your mind. This is the experience that the listeners told me, thousands of people. So we were expecting a good start. Things were starting to be good for us after, like, nine years of our career without major success. We toured with a lot of bands, we went to many countries in Europe and also Japan in 2018, but until April 2018, we were not needed by anyone. And we were independent 100 percent. It was more difficult to get in contact with the people that rule our business.

So during our tour that we did in the spring of 2018, we met Maurizio Iacono, the singer of Kataklysm and Ex Deo. That tour was Wind Rose, Ex Deo and Ensiferum headlining. On that tour, we made a strong friendship with Maurizio. He showed us the strength of people that started from nothing. We started from our room, in the periphery of a small town, in an abandoned estate. We enjoyed all the suffering during the years, [laughs] but we were stoic. I guess that our stoicism made us successful. We were stubborn, we were not stopping for anything, for a “no” or for a fail or for anything. We continuously worked. Even if we were working in a factory during the day, at night, we were composing, we were recording. It was a long process, and I guess that things that are made over a long process, they are the things that will stay, no?

You released the song “Rock and Stone,” which is a collaboration with the game Deep Rock Galactic. What was the process like working on that song? Did you work directly with the game developer [Ghost Ship Games] in order to make it?
The initial idea was to have them do the video with us because we saw that on their TikTok, they made some videos with in-game recordings, with the models, et cetera. But they told us that they didn’t have the ability to make it. So we asked about the collaboration and permission for it, but the song is 100 percent Wind Rose. They just get the [association] of the popularity that the song was getting, because there was no chance to [collaborate]. Talking about music, we didn’t need anyone. If you put in another element, it would be not a Wind Rose song, it would be a different song. We wanted to do the video together, which was not possible, so we made it on our own in our studios.

Looking at the comments, it seems like a lot of people are really excited to see you guys working on a Deep Rock Galactic song. Are you happy with the reception that you’ve gotten so far?
Yeah. In September 2023, when we did the headliner tours, everyone was screaming, “Rock and Stone!” And also in the U.S. this year, spring of 2024, everyone, everyone was screaming “Rock and Stone! Rock and Stone!” Every time! And we were like, Come on! If they knew that we have a song ready to release in July, they will die. And at some point, I started to tell to some fans, like, “Hey, you know what? In July, we will release this song called ‘Rock and Stone.’” And they were like, “No! What the fuck?” “And I told you because nobody will believe you anyway.” [Laughs] It was cool.

A lot of the bands that we speak to who haven’t worked with a game company before express a lot of interest in being able to do a song for a game. As somebody who has now collaborated directly with Ghost Ship Studios in order to do this “Rock and Stone” video—even though you did it yourself, but you were in contact with the developer—what advice, if any, could you give to a band trying to reach out to the video game community in order to get that kind of work?
I would tell the band to ask themselves why they want their song to be in a video game. Usually it’s the opposite—it’s the developer that contacts you because your style fits with the game. The opposite does not work, in my opinion. If there is a band that has a really strong identity, I would just start to talk with just the game developers that have that imprinting. For example, they just put of song of Sabaton’s in the game World of Tanks because, yes, they are the guys of the fucking World War. Who else would do a song for them? It’s obvious. They have “Primo Victoria” ready, now it’s on a tank. They fit with the game.

To be honest, it’s a different market and if I’m a developer, I would probably like to have a composer more than a band. Just listen to the background music of Skyrim. It’s something awesome. That’s probably more work for a composer than a band itself. So, I don’t know. I don’t have any advice for the guys, I’m sorry. If you feel it, then you feel that the people coming to your shows are demanding this kind of stuff because you have a song about Halo and the new Halo is coming out, just try for it. If you have the contacts, if you have the management, whip their asses and make that work. [Laughs]

Power metal has always had this very strong connection with high fantasy and as a community, power metal has been much more accepting of things like video games and nerd culture. But what we’re discovering through this column, however, is that there really is a deep love for games across every sub-genre of metal. There’s always going to be a subset of people who have grown up with video games and love it to death and use it for inspiration. Do you see video games becoming as significant of an influence on lyrical content, on musical content to metal as something like books have been in the past? Or is it always going to be something much more minor?
This we will never know. For example, most of the songs that I wrote for Warfront, they are inspired directly by Warhammer: Return of Reckoning. That is a private server of Warhammer Online because Warhammer Online is not up anymore. I was playing there with my clan, and we were, like, 40 people and fighting to get back the fortresses, epic battles lasting for 6, 8 hours. Most of the lyrics, I wrote them with these people online. I was actually talking about what we were living in the game. Especially, for example, “Together We Rise,” it’s 100 percent me and these guys playing Warhammer Online. “Gates of Ekrund,” the same. But it’s a shame because in these kinds of MMOs, I never played the dwarf. I’m sorry about that. I just played once.

That was going to be one of my [James] questions, and I thought it was maybe too on the nose. Do you always play dwarves? If not dwarves, then what’s your go-to class or race?
When there is the possibility to make a dwarf, I go for dwarf. World of Warcraft, I go for the rogue dwarf because it’s OP. They make the combo, and then they blind you, and then they wait to make the combo again, or they use prep and they do the combo again. So what happens? When you are a dwarf rogue, you can actually remove the blindness with Stoneform, so fuck off! I remove the blindness, I stun you, and then I do the combo to you. That’s how it goes. So when there is a chance, I use the dwarf.

On Warhammer Online, one of my characters is a Dwarf Slayer. I used to always play DPS, and I’m the main assist that calls for targets usually. And if there is not [a dwarf], I have to adapt to the race of the class. Most of the time, rogue is a human or elf, unfortunately, so you don’t have much chance to choose something. The barbarian usually is an ogre, so you are an orc at the end—you cannot choose. When you have no choice, I have to choose another class. And also in Warhammer, some DPS, the fire mage was from the Empire. The White Lion was from the High Elves, and a White Lion was one of my mains. It’s ranked super high, one of the most used, one of the most famous on that server. I played that game so much.

Why the dwarf? Because I like them. I think that they are mysterious. They are not so mainstream like elves. In the ’90s, the power battle was about elves most of the time. Also in the early 2000s. The elves are like the Roman Empire, or Roman Republic, depending on what you’re talking about. So if you do a power metal song about the Roman Empire, it’s not very impressive. [In regards to business], I chose dwarves because in 2013, 2014, we wrote a song that was called “The Breed of Durin,” and that song was the one with a different flavor on the album Wardens of the West Wind, the second album. It had a sort of Viking vibe. But we are not Vikings—we are Italians. It would be stupid to make a band about Vikings and dress like Vikings. I don’t like this kind of stuff. When I see people where it’s not their culture and they’re dressed like another’s [culture], for me, it’s a big no. And so I said, “I look like a dwarf. Why don’t we do dwarves?” At the beginning, the guys, they were a bit skeptical because “the people will get tired of this and that” and blah, blah, blah. It was the right decision, the right path to follow.

We followed the path that was more successful because at the end, we were doing the music that we like and the other members, they adapted a bit. They started to get more informed about dwarves and about Lord of the Rings. Most of us know gaming and Lord of the Rings, et cetera. I’m the one that write the lyrics, so I choose the topics.

If there’s somebody who’s a fan of the band but maybe doesn’t really spend a lot of time on fantasy games but is interested in the idea, what video game would you recommend?
In my opinion, they should try World of Warcraft to start if they are totally new to this. If they are more into single-player games, they could try the Elder Scrolls saga. But the most epic battles I made were on a game that is now probably dead called Gloria Victis. It was an MMO with two realms at the beginning, and then three realms. It was a sort of Medieval search for loot. You were going outside the city and you can get killed, and then they loot not everything, but almost everything from you. The most epic battles that I had were on that game because dying there was actually painful. It was for real. People were pondering so much what to do as a next move, because they know that it could result in a failure of the assault on a fortress. In that game, I felt for real the sensation of battle. But I think that everything is very personal. So I would just start with World of Warcraft and the main MMOs that allows PVP. In my opinion, our music is more for PvP than PvE. It’s more for battle, you know?

That’s interesting. That does add a lot of scale. If I’m [James] playing, say, the recent Final Fantasy, if I lose a fight and I start right at the beginning of the fight, nothing lost, no change, there’s no sense of dread. Whereas if you lose all of your gear and then there’s the fate of the fortress at risk, you’re more focused, more invested.
Yes, you are important, so you commit to it 100 percent. I remember in Warhammer, before starting the session, when you were attacking a fortress, you were [setting it on fire] on the map. So we were [setting aflame] some fortress and then putting force on another one to make the people of the other faction go to give us some time to at least break the first door and then get inside the fortress. I remember that was very cool and tactical and there was a big commitment between everyone. The group there is a war band and it’s 24 people, so it’s 4 groups of 6 people. It’s a lot. And when you do AOE damage, there is a lot of damage. The healers must be on point. The tanks need to switch to guard to mitigate the damage to the DPS, because if the DPS or the healers die, it’s hard to recover. Everyone was very committed and I remember the war band leader was screaming. It was something serious, you know? It was our pride, or our fault if we were failing. I remember it was like playing the World Cup every night.

Are there any games coming up that you’re excited to play?
To be honest, there’s not much. The games that I played that I loved required a lot of progress. The sense of progress that I want is not a thing anymore in this society. The new players, the younger generations, they have everything at the beginning or they stop playing. And eventually they stop playing anyway. Every game gets boring after a couple of months.

What ideally would you be looking for, then? What kind of thing would you love to see hypothetically?
For example, I loved Diablo IV, but every two months you have to start again. That’s a big no. It made the game die, in my opinion. There is the new season and you still have your character, but things that you dropped are changed. It was different, but it gives you the sense that you don’t have an affection to your character. What I look for in games is not an option anymore because it’s not on the market. People don’t want to spend 100 hours to reach max level because it’s important to grind.

You’d like more of a long-term build, a longer progression?
Yeah, because if you have a longer progression, when you arrive at the end, you know exactly what you’re talking about, all the aspects of your characters. And also, you get a sense of affection to your faction or realm or to your guild or to your character. Most of the people that meet me in the game, they call me Demetrious because Demetrious was my nickname. For them, I was that character. This is the kind of affection that I look for in a game. For them, it’s like, “Ah, Demetrious!” They call me this because for them, I am that character actually. Nowadays, it’s not like this. You log on and then you play one hour and then you log off and you haven’t lost anything, you haven’t gained anything.

I [Michael] definitely see what you’re saying. Something like Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown, Fortnite, they’re all centered around these 10 to 20 minute rounds where you have a fresh character, you go in and you either win or lose—and then that’s it. There’s no real commitment to any long grind.
Yes. If you don’t have a long-term… I mean, not like in 2000 where to reach max level—like in Dark Age of Camelot, that I told you is my favorite game—we were spending, like, one year to arrive at the final form of the character, 8 months, 10 months. It was so frustrating. Maybe you want to change to play another character. But if you spend the time to max out your character—you spend two months, for example—for me, it’s a good commitment to months of playing hard. If you don’t play hard, you can spend, like, four months. At least when you arrive at the end, you have something you value. If you play and you can have everything you want, or unless the PvP is very interesting or the PVE is fantastic, the game will die.

I’m sorry, I’m probably too negative for this kind of thing. Maybe I’m too old. That one, yes. That’s probably why I don’t understand these kind of games nowadays that are mostly mobile phone games. “Go and kill 10 wolves,” and you go, you kill 10 wolves and then you click and the character goes by himself to the checkpoint. You don’t even enjoy the surroundings. It’s all automatic. You just log on because you have to roll the dice and get the daily prize and do this kind of bullshit that comes from the Korean games. They don’t make any sense. At the end, if you make the circle smaller and smaller, then you realize that the concept of the game is not much more than this.

Trollslayer is available October 4 via Napalm Records and can be pre-ordered here.
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