INTRODUCING: King Kraken
When it comes to having heavy, groove-soaked rock, KING KRAKEN have the market cornered. The South Wales lads have had a swathe of meaty single releases from their second album March Of The Gods. We caught up with drummer Richard Lee Mears about the band’s attitude to writing, the progress from their first album and showing a softer side.
The band work incredibly hard to produce their music, and the reception they’ve received as they have grown has been very positive. That positivity obviously comes from within first and foremost, as KING KRAKEN eat up being musicians from writing, to making videos. While they love their craft, it’s still a fairly strange process to go through, to write and release an album. “Yeah, this album seems to come around a lot easier than what the first album, which is a bit mad,” Ruchard laughs. “I don’t know whether that’s just a bit of, like a learning curve or whatever the case may be, but yeah, it just seems to come along a lot easier. Maybe we didn’t expect so much off of the first album, you know? I mean, so everything was a bit of a shock, but it was a bit of an, ‘oh my God’ moment, you know? So maybe we’re a bit more used to that this time, I don’t know. But yeah, it’s been great, I gotta be honest, really, really good.”
While there’s definitely an overarching theme to the record, while feels like KING KRAKEN are really flexing what they can do, it wasn’t an intentional refining process. “It was kind of a natural thing, to be honest, though, because we didn’t, we didn’t initially have like, a plan of what the album was. In fairness, that’s the same with the first one. We just wrote a bunch of songs, and then the theme kind of emerged.”
The record is brimming with epic bangers like Berserker and Chainsaw Saviour, which are accompanied by yet more epic and hugely entertaining videos. Be it Vikings or pulp classics, KING KRAKEN are a riot. This time around, their creative process has honed in on mythology for its core. “I mean, we’ve always been a band that does songs about monsters and stupid stuff, like, you know? Our singer is very much into the horror vibe, the song Haddonfield ’78 is inspired from Halloween, yeah? So we’ve always been into that type of thing. But the overall theme is the ancient Greek sort of mythology. but then we’ve got, like, zombies and stuff mixed in too! So, it isn’t all one direction, so to speak. But yeah, we’ve always, we’ve always had that ability to write songs about random things, basically. And Hero is actually like, probably our only like factual song, as in, it’s not written about mythical beasts and stuff.”
While KING KRAKEN have had no shortage of inspiration for their bombastic music, they’ve been sure to compile a record that has a focus. “We wrote Scream, the first song, probably about a year and a half ago and thought, ‘that’s gotta be the first song on the album’,” Richard reminisces, “And then thought, ‘right, okay, so what comes after that?’ [we were conscious to] change things up, change the groove, change the bits and pieces here and there. You could say this album is more crafted than the what the first album was. We actually spent time in thinking, ‘What do we need in the next album.’ We looked at the whole album and thought where does this song fit? Where does this song fit? If it doesn’t fit, it fucks off, you know what I mean. It is very much an album that we’ve really crafted.”
Circling round to the developments in their sound, for their second record, KING KRAKEN have shown a softer side of themselves with Hero, a reflection of real-life struggles. “It’s about to Mark‘s dad,” Richard explains. “[He] died I think about five or six years ago. It was before got together. [And it’s about] what he would say to him if he could. We always had an idea of showing a bit more mellow side of us. We’ve always jammed in practice and done, like, the blues, maybe riff off some our own songs and stuff like that. It’s just always been a part of us. It’s just like we can play that, as well as we can play the heavy stuff as well. But we’ve never really shown that side of us, like, so we were a bit nervous as well.”
The band aren’t afraid of facing things head on with their songs, from this latest track to offerings from their debut. “Green Terror from the first album is actually written over the band,” Richard says, “It’s about how we are when we’re together and all the rest the sound we create, and all the rest of it. Veins from the first that was about addiction, because both Mark and I are mental health nurses, so all that’s relevant to us; wrote that about the things that we see as mental health nurses.”
“With the first album, we didn’t put anything chilled on, really, you know what I mean? We have never shown that side of us. It’s come to the point that I was like, right let’s do something a little bit different now. It’s nice to take that a little bit of a different angle.”
March Of The Gods is out now via self-release. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS120 here:
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