Mass Worship: Positively Charged Negativity
“One of the top criteria is that it should feel like you’re getting run over by a tank essentially,” laughs MASS WORSHIP drummer Fred Forsberg. The Swedish four-piece’s principal songwriter is attempting to shed some light on some of the thought processes behind their latest album Portal Tombs, and honestly, we couldn’t put it any better than that. Portal Tombs is a tour-de-force in bleak and punishing extreme metal, an exercise in heaviness in everything from its instrumentation to its themes. In many ways, it’s a natural successor to the band’s similarly oppressive self-titled debut, building on that record’s crushing nature while also expanding their palette to yield even more impressive results.
“One of the things we wanted to change this time around was essentially to add more melodies across the whole thing, and kind of turn up the knobs for quite a few of the other things too,” explains Forsberg. “We use this band as a means to try to communicate things that are not as easy to communicate through language. Music paints a bigger picture and we’re all for exploring the different ways of using music to communicate different emotions essentially. That’s really about it, we don’t really care about the style or anything like that.”
It’s with this seeming disinterest in boundaries that Forsberg and co. have produced a record that sits in a relatively unique space, one characterised by little other than pure sonic annihilation. He elucidates: “For me and the other guys in the band, we have roots in punk and crust punk, and all of that stuff has this urgency and aggression that I think a lot of other genres don’t really nail. It’s this pure fucking primal aggression, so since I have that background it’s intuitive of me to express it that way. But I’m also inspired by bands like OPETH and stuff like that and I really love the concept of exploring heaviness in unconventional ways. That’s really what’s interesting to me – how we can make it sound heavy without it being necessarily a breakdown or some djenty stuff or whatever.”
Of course, matching MASS WORSHIP’s musical intensity is an equally weighty thematic focus, with Portal Tombs finding the band, in their own words, seeking to “capture the confusion, the fears, the pain, the uncertainty and the total disbelief in the future of mankind.” It’s a bleak soundtrack for bleak times, but Forsberg is quick to emphasise the power in facing up to the demons and the darkness. “It’s kind of like positively charged negativity,” he muses. “It’s super negative and depressing, but to me I need to acknowledge it and that’s my hope with it. I need to lift these emotions so that I am real with myself… It is heavy when you’re going through it, when you’re writing stuff, but at the end of it you still feel relieved in some weird way and I think it’s like this weird connection when people listen to it too.”
Expanding on that last point, Forsberg admits he isn’t exactly sure what it is that seems to be drawing people to such unflinching expressions of despair of late, but he suggests: “I kind of believe that we’ve reached a point where people can’t see any future really, we’ve kind of lost our future vision. We don’t believe in anything really anymore and we’re very nihilistic as a society in a way, and I think that there are certain bands that are trying to explore this state of emotion that we are in right now… to me the most logical way to communicate it is via brutality, this heaviness is just natural. And I think it might be like an underlying emotional state, that’s also why I hope to evoke some emotions that people might be suppressing on a large scale.”
If that sums up MASS WORSHIP’s modus operandi, then it certainly seems to have worked well so far. Portal Tombs arrives hot off the back of a run of supporting dates with Polish death metal legends VADER – an experience Forsberg describes as like a “cold shower” for someone of his punk roots, in that he realised metal bands are really good at what they’re doing. The album itself also features some impressive guests in Barney Greenway of NAPALM DEATH, Jonas Stålhammar of AT THE GATES and Jonas Renkse of BLOODBATH and KATATONIA. Naturally, the band were over the moon to land such impressive patronage, with Forsberg practically beaming: “It’s a fucking privilege working with people like that and that they feel ok with putting their mark on a record that is ours. It’s just insane… We’re super grateful for all of it.”
Finally, turning back to that murky future, the world at large may have lost some direction of late, but MASS WORSHIP know exactly what’s next for them. “The number one goal for us since the very beginning was to tour as much as physically possible. Unfortunately the pandemic happened so it put a bit of a stop to us, but that’s really the goal. We want to play as much as possible and we want to write as much music as possible and that’s it. We’re using this to express ourselves and then using that expression to play live. All of us are lifers, we want to tour and play and that’s all we want to do really.”
Portal Tombs is out now via Century Media Records.
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