Mastiff: Finding Meaning Through Misery
The self-described “miserable band from a miserable town”, MASTIFF, aren’t quite how they describe themselves – at least, not in person. Musically, they’re absolutely that and more – a raucous blend of blackened sludge, doom, death metal and sheer rage that leaves you feeling emotionally hollowed.
“If something doesn’t sound like it wouldn’t make someone want to tear their own face off listening to it, then it goes in the bin,” is how guitarist James Andrew Lee describes their writing process, but during our time together he’s nothing if not cheerful and pleasant throughout, only too happy to talk about how they approached their new record Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth, its themes and just why they write such harrowing music.
This dichotomy between band and person is largely down to the music they make; as James tells it, “it’s all sort of our personal sort of punching bag. Everything that we’ve got boiling up inside of us, instead of taking out on each other or other people, we just sort of distil it all into horrible music. It means that we all get to live reasonably content lives without all that horrific stuff simmering behind our eyes.”
This horrific stuff as he so aptly sums it up, manifests in a number of ways across their catalogue. Previous album Plague was, despite the name, not written in the last eighteen months but a few years ago in the halcyon days of 2018-2019, dealing with the ills of social media addiction and how it poisons personal relationships. Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth doesn’t quite have that overarching narrative but “there are little bits and pieces that tie into the title, the idea that every generation is kind of like, fucking the next generation in the way that they’re treating the planet and its resources and just, each other.” As James puts it, “you could piece together that overarching narrative to the record if you wanted and you wouldn’t be wrong, necessarily,” but songs do have specific meanings to them while still very much remaining in their natural realm of “human suffering and the shit we do to each other for inane reasons.”
Creating the album was, again, a departure from Plague. The two and a bit years between releases is the longest stretch they’ve ever gone without releasing new music, though this wasn’t their original intention – and not only due to the pandemic. “After Plague was done, our original intention was we wanted to literally make like a grind EP. We thought, what if we just did six tracks, none of them over two minutes,” he explains of the genesis of what eventually became Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth. “We wrote two songs in that vein, one of them was Fail, and the other one was Acid Breather that ended up on the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack. And as is often the case with those, we got that far in and the next thing we wrote just happened to be Futile, this song in the middle of the album that’s got this big sort of droney, doomy intro and then turns into an ALL PIGS MUST DIE song at the end!”
Ultimately the band learned a valuable lesson from this. “We tried to box ourselves in by saying we’ll do this kind of release and that just doesn’t work for us. Our attention spans are too short to focus in on just doing one kind of thing,” he explains, “and I think if we had done that, that would have been to our detriment and to the detriment of what we eventually ended up producing because I think it’ a lot more interesting record that we’ve made than if we had just thrown out a ten minute grind EP.”
He’s certainly not wrong that it’s a fascinating record; taking cues from its predecessor, the band also felt emboldened to bring in more influences from outside their usual sludgy home turf. “I think we all kind of feel better pulling things in that. Certainly when I was newer to the band and Dan [Dolby, bass] was new to the band we’ve maybe been a bit afraid to suggest because, well, MASTIFF’s not that kind of band. Then when me and Dan joined, he brings a lot of the kind of harsh noise elements he’s really big into.” For himself, it was a lot more of the “kind of crust, grind, hardcore bands like TRAP THEM, BLACK BREATH and things like that.” Now they’ve been in the band a few years, they’re a lot more comfortable bringing their own influences to the table, to help forge an expanded sound for MASTIFF that doesn’t sacrifice any of their intensity or nihilism; if anything, Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth is a far more bleak record than their previous work.
Despite the bleak nature of the music, or perhaps, as mentioned during our conversation, because of it, they find themselves having a far more positive and content life – though as he freely admits, the band thrive on a stage and try to capture that through their records. Thankfully, soon they’ll be able to bring their miserable band to everyone else’s miserable towns, and have a thoroughly not miserable time doing it.
Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth is out now via eOne Heavy.
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