Dirk: This is one of the songs on "The Living Infinite" that we arranged as a band. Speed wrote the riffs and basic structure and sent us all a demo. Shortly before heading to the studio, we hit the rehearsal space and played through the song a number of times, adding ideas as we went along. The bass guitar/kick drum pattern variations in the chorus were something our bassist Ola suggested, adding a good amount of bottom-end groove in the process. David and Sylvain refined some of the guitar parts and I added the fast double kicks and blasts in the lead section which somehow reminded me of a more Swedish-sounding Scarve riff, with those off-beat accents. I can't recall if Speed had all of his vocal lines figured out yet at that time- but either way, he delivered yet another one of his majestic choruses that get stuck in your head for days. We selected "Rise Above The Sentiment" as the first video off of "The Living Infinite" and gave director Sune Eskelinen a bunch of studio footage. He came back to us with the dancing grandpa, a nice counterpoint to the typically dead serious videos that tend to prevail in this genre of music. All in all, this is bound to become a classic Soilwork track if you ask me!

Speed: I'm trying to remember if I actually had the chorus in my head first or if I just started working on the riffage. I just wanted to make a real simple intro with a soaring melody over it. I remember I started working on the song at a very early stage of the songwriting process for "The Living Infinite". Once I put the melody on top of the riff it had a pretty old school Soilwork feel to it, slightly nostalgic but also an updated feel to it. As far as I can remember, I finished up the song once I came back to Sweden in the summer last year. I had a really nice flow of inspiration sitting in my house by the water with my windows open, watching the sea glowing. The lyrical theme has a pretty classic "comeback" feel to it, to rise once again, to let go of old things and traumatic experiences which I've unfortunately experienced the latest years. I wanted it to be a positive anthem with a hopeful feel to it. It's about the feeling of reaching a point that you strongly believe that you're never gonna be able to shake. The mind can play incredible tricks on you and suddenly you find yourself, out of nowhere reaching that point that you thought was an impossible quest. However, I'm somewhat of an anti "new age" guy, I strongly believe that you need to let yourself feeling down and let the anxiety take over and ride it like a wave, instead of denying that feeling and forcing positive thoughts on yourself. Otherwise they will always come back. I see a lot of "you put yourself in that situation, it's your own fault, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Everybody has the same chance in life" etc on Facebook for example. It does sickens me. I'm not saying that feeling sorry for yourself is gonna make things better but people tend to abuse that term just as much as there are people acting like the world owes them something. Both are equally irritating. The lyric is also bringing up issues with these elements and views.