1914: Yours Faithfully, War

Themed bands can often be a tad hit or miss; bands not just lyrically devoted to a subject, but that subject inhabiting every aspect of the band, from stage names and costumes to aesthetics and merch. Depending on how it’s executed, it can be perceived either as a masterstroke of creativity or an exercise in ridiculousness that reeks of gorgonzola. Fortunately, Ukrainian black metallers 1914 fall into the former camp, their exploration of the First World War thematically grandiose and bleak in equal measure, while also meticulously researched and historically accurate. The Ukrainians rocketed to the international extreme metal spotlight following the 2018 release of their absolutely stunning second offering, The Blind Leading The Blind, and armed with a new partnership with Napalm Records they are back and better than ever ready to explore Where Fear And Weapons Meet.

“The main difference between Where Fear And Weapons Meet and The Blind Leading The Blind is hope. The Blind Leading The Blind was gloomy and everyone died – it was just mud, blood, trenches and death. This time things are a bit different, yes it’s still about death and the horrors of war, but it’s also about hope, life, about soldiers making it home – even the artwork is more hopeful; you see a wounded soldier reaching out to Death, but Death doesn’t take his hand,” Muses vocalist and lyricist, Dima Kumar, on the progression from their breakthrough album to their major label debut. “I’m trying to tell stories of the war – there’s no fucking glorification here, fuck that, we’re telling the stories of the soldiers and their fates, not generals or commanders, fuck the generals – these stories are about regular guys like you and me who were just pieces of meat for empires.”

Outside of the incredibly high quality of the music on offer from 1914, perhaps the most impressive aspect of the band is the level of research from Kumar. The First World War is an area of history that has been tackled in heavy metal lyricism before, but arguably never as in depth as 1914. There are no offensives, no “over the top” attacks fabricated for dramatic purposes, no nameless heroes or characters created to serve the purpose of the story Kumar is trying to tell. Everyone named in his lyrics was a real man, a real person who faced unimaginable horrors in one of the countless theatres of conflict in The Great War or whose actions impacted the war in some way, from Private Henry Johnson, a black soldier of the American ‘Harlem Hellfighters’ who was the first American to receive France’s highest military honour, the Croix du Guerre, for single-handedly thwarting a German attack on the French lines armed with little more than a bolo knife to the Corps d’autos-canons-mitrailleuses, a Belgian unit of 300 armoured cars who fought on the Eastern Front for the Russian army, notably in Western Ukraine.

“I visited a cemetery and the graves of some of the Belgian soldiers who died here in Ukraine and spoke with the great grandsons of some of these soldiers. Every song is about real people, every song is about the fate of a real human life – it’s not just a bit of my weird imagination, ‘let’s sing about some suffering,’ no. I’m reading, I’m digging, I’m searching. To prepare one song, I read four or five books, memoirs, pour over maps, visit museums, and visit the real historical places.” Kumar comments, keen to make it perfectly clear his work isn’t a chest-pounding display of war and glory, but a real insight into the horrors of the First World War based on meticulous research. “The main reason for this band, the main reason for 1914isn’t about music; it’s about storytelling. The music is secondary for me, the main reason for this band, to me, is to tell the stories of these real soldiers, tell the stories of these real things that happened.”

It’s impossible to not get caught up in the passion behind Kumar’s words and the emotional connection he feels to this period in history. As the conversation progresses from Where Fear And Weapons Meet to almost documentary-like discussions of the Carpathian Winter Operation and the Brusilov Offensive, Kumar takes a step back and offers an insight into his writing process for 1914’s last record, The Blind Leading The Blind.

“While writing for The Blind Leading The Blind, I travelled for a month across the battlefields in France. I’m sleeping in shell craters in Argonne Forest, I’m spending days just with my backpack sleeping in trenches near Verdun, I’m looking at the stars at the same point millions of people died and trying to understand ‘why?’ I visited the Somme, I visited Verdun, I went to the museums, it’s not just shit I read on Wikipedia,” Kumar reflects. “1914 do try to be as historically correct as possible – this isn’t fantasy metal, we’re not Walt Disney metal, we are a historically correct band.”

The future is looking really rather bright – in the bleakest possible way – for 1914. The immense quality of Where Fear And Weapons Meet shows that The Blind Leading The Blind wasn’t a brief spark of genius but the foundations of something really special for the Ukrainian outfit, while 2022 finally sees the rescheduled tour dates from 2020 come to fruition. And not a band to bask in their own success, plans are already in motion for album four, their most ambitious and exciting work to date.

“Can I talk about the future plans?” Kumar asks tentatively, as if the answer was ever going to be ‘no’. “I want to write a book, like a soldier’s diary. It will be about an Austro-Hungarian soldier who fought on the Italian front, in the mountains. We will turn the book into a concept album about this soldier and his story on the Italian front, so it will be released as both a book and an album. In fact, as soon as we sent Where Fear And Weapons Meet to Napalm Records I started work on this – I can’t wait!”

Neither can we, Dima, neither can we.

Where Fear And Weapons Meet is out now via Napalm Records.

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