INTERVIEW: Michael Kalusche & Nils Richber – Walking Dead On Broadway

Deathcore has come a long way since its original explosion back in the late 2000s. The primitive and predictable nature of that first wave is long extinct and with more bands opting to incorporate a wide pallet of varying sounds and traits, the style is experiencing something of a identity crisis. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though as it opens the door for creativity to engulf the next generation of bands. After slogging away with their OG deathcore sound, Germany’s WALKING DEAD ON BROADWAY arrive with their third record, Dead Era, and it’s their most progressive and forward-thinking opus to date. As the band prepare to drop their new record this week, we spoke with guitarist Michael ‘Micha’ Kalusche and vocalist Nils Richber to talk about their brave new direction on Dead Era, including its themes and tone, alongside discussing the decline of the original sound of deathcore.

So the release of WALKING DEAD ON BROADWAY’s brand new album, Dead Era, is just around the corner. What can we expect from the upcoming record?

Micha: Yes, exactly, not long left until release and we’re already really excited. With Dead Era we leave behind our roots in deathcore to a large degree and we’ll present the listener with a significant evolution of our sound. You could say that Dead Era is a symbiosis of heaviness and melody. I think that we have pushed ourselves to a new level with the album and the new sound and we’re really proud of this.

Nils: You can expect some more versatility among the different songs and I guess it has a kind of transitional and more experimental character, browsing aspects and possibilities for further musical development. Regarding vocals, of course I add to the change with a very different style of writing the patterns and with a much stronger political emphasis, when it
comes to lyrics.

Dead Era arrives two years after your last record, Slaves. How have you grown and developed in that time?

Micha: We have definitely become more open minded about our music and we don’t confine ourselves to home-grown constraints any more, e.g. in songwriting. Two years ago we didn’t include some stylistic elements, because we were concerned about not scaring off our fans. We have withdrawn from this now and begun writing songs more as it feels right to us.

The new album is also the first record to feature your new vocalist Nils Richber. What does he bring to WALKING DEAD ON BROADWAY?

Micha: Oh, a lot. Nils is really a talented musician and he knows exactly well, what he’s doing. He has an incredible range with his voice, covering everything from clean singing to low growling. That doesn’t mean we have clean singing on the album, though we could have, [laughs]. Furthermore he is pushing us to an entirely new level, as to our lyrics. He really is a very good lyricist and we are really proud, that he has become part of WALKING DEAD ON BROADWAY since November last year.

Nils: I also provide painted toenails and not having tattoos, [laughs].

With the addition of Richber, do you feel that you have now have the final piece of the puzzle and found your definitive identity as a band?

Micha: Absolutely. I think with Nils we have definitely found ourselves as a band.

Nils: It might be the case with respect to the line-up, but musically I think identity is never definitive, but only always repetition through a difference.

Can you describe the writing and recording process for Dead Era?

Nils: When I entered the process it was almost already finished, so I didn’t contribute so much to the songs, despite, of course, lyrics and vocals. But at that point of time we already had to meet a rather tight schedule, so for me writing and recording the stuff was more like a short-term excess of work. Also, the result wouldn’t be as good as it is, if Max [Kette, guitars] wouldn’t have invested so much of his spare time during the critical period. He was transposing riffs into tabs, arranging drums, recording pre-productions and tweaking the impossible load of annoying details that pile up, despite he had to work full time. So he made it possible to collectively revise a lot of stuff, which we otherwise would have had no time to examine. I’m planning to get into songwriting again quite soon, to have more space for ideas to unfold and to add some of my own spice to the musical source code of WALKING DEAD ON BROADWAY.

Micha: For the album I usually I pre-wrote the songs completely based on the guitar. I tried a lot, as long until I was a hundred percent satisfied. This may take some time, sometimes I need a couple of days for one song, sometimes a couple of weeks or I even had two months once, because I simply wasn’t satisfied with the material. When the guitar was fix, I met with our other guitarist Max and we went through the songs together, again changing some parts. If we were done with that we recorded a pre-production in Max’s studio and then we already started with bass and drums. Once they were done, we went for the vocals. We find it important to have the vocals done last, because here you can accentuate features of the given song structure, respectively you already have a groove according to which to set the patterns. Everything that has to do with recording we get done by ourselves in Max’s studio. This time, nevertheless, the post production was not done by Chris Wieczorek, who did it on our previous albums, but by Noah Sebastian and Joakim Karlsson of BAD OMENS. This was really a great collaboration! They understood exactly what we wanted and where we wanted to go with the new stuff and this made a lot of things easy. Apart from that, both of them are very talented and also had a lot of ideas, which we would not have thought of by ourselves. But for the mixing and mastering we were working together with Chris again, since we have always been more than content with his work and since we are already well attuned to each other.

This new album features somewhat of a musical evolution from your deathcore roots. Can you explain what direction you are taking WALKING DEAD ON BROADWAY moving forward?

Micha: There is no direction or no master plan here, about where we want to go. We just write what we feel like writing and how it feels right to us. As long as we stand firmly behind our work, we have done everything right.

Nils: For me, it feels like deathcore has been down a musical one-way street for some time and consequently lost the energy of the initial years. But I think, since the hype has largely shifted away not only from deathcore, but from the modern metal scene in general, there might be room for a creative and reorientation, that some bands are already undergoing. Maybe Dead Era will be part of that in some respects. But, as I mentioned, I consider it more a revisitation of our creative potentials.

I feel one of the biggest strengths of this new direction, and indeed the record itself, is the use of these subtle atmospherics behind the big riffs. Can you elaborate on why you wanted to incorporate this musical element into Dead Era and what do you feel it brings to the record’s atmosphere?

Micha: Thank you, first of all, I’m happy you like it. Basically we have already used atmospheric elements on our first album Aeshma. On Slaves we took them more in a melodic direction, in songs as Pitchblack, Silen or Death Pilgrim and on Dead Era we simply built even more upon that. To a degree, it is a challenge to mix these elements with heavy music, since there is no lack of strong contrasts. But this is exactly what we found zestful and appealing. Every song has its own vibe thanks to those elements but also adds well to the other songs, so we feel like we have written a coherent album to be proud of.

Nils: We had an idea about the atmospheric character we wanted to have in the songs, but it is on precisely this point, that the contribution of Noah Sebastian was absolutely precious and indispensable to what the album is. From my personal perspective, I was very glad about having these elements in the songs, because they certainly add a sense of temper. And this sense of temper is crucial for me, as to writing consistent lyrics. If songs lack the element of mood, my lyrics become uninspired and take on a more propositional, speech-like character.

What lyrical topics are you looking to address with this record?

Nils: The album title refers to the idea of end of history or ‘posthistoire’. The point is, that global capitalism seems to have smashed every positive vision of a humane way of dealing with one another on the large scale, leaving us with a dramatic lack of imagination and with a vacuum in historical time. In remote realms of social life like in sports, there’s never enough talk about ‘writing history’, but within the scope of geopolitics for example, everything just seems to simply happen, without really interfering with the very framework of how we understand our situation as a whole. Politics consequently deals with this in an immediate and unreflective language of conservation and administration. But although history seems to have ended, there’s a bunch of questions unanswered, hopes abandoned, victims (un)forgotten and dead bodies unburied. The lyrics try to emphasise that this is not enough, that the undead of the past have no reason to stop haunting us with guilt and discontent and that there is no way of buying us out. Concretely, I tackle a lot of political issues, like the critique of labour, the shortcomings of ‘democratic antifascism’, state violence and surveillance, classism, the outsourcing of crises. But some songs also deal with theology and with the critique of religion.

With Dead Era being WALKING DEAD ON BROADWAY’s crucial third record, how do you feel it compares to your previous two records?

Micha: Honestly, I’ve never been so proud of an album. After we finished the mix/master of Aeshma and Slaves, we basically bunged them aside and didn’t listen to it again, after we had listened to it for what seemed to be like 500 times. By contrast, Dead Era is a record I still listen to today and I’m not at all annoyed by it. It’s funny somehow, that with its 53 minutes, it is our longest record, but it feels like 30 minutes listening, [laughs]. I still really like listening through the album, we can’t say that so much about Aeshma and Slaves, [laughs].

Nils: Personally I still love playing songs of Aeshma, but I’m an exception here anyway, since I approached them mainly as a listener and didn’t have to play them all the time throughout this amount of years, [laughs].

It sounds like a simple question, but what do you hope to achieve with Dead Era?

Micha: For us personally we have already achieved everything by just being proud of the material. That’s worth a lot already. We of course hope that the fans out there will like it as much as we and that they may take a look at the lyrics and think about them.

Nils: Yes, I’d agree that first and foremost music is instrumental to nothing outside of itself. But what I hope anything that I create to be, is something that is not easily neutralised by people’s, or even my own habitual way of perceiving things. I know well that this is all part of an entertainment culture, but I aim at creating something beyond simple, presupposition-less and ineffective entertainment, as much as the circumstances and my own diffidence allow me to. Apart from that, I think Dead Era is a rather simple and direct record. I tried to shape my lyrics according to that musical character and at the same time keep them as reflective and dialectical as possible – addressing the listener most directly, but also trying not to invite an easy identification with what is being said, reversing and thwarting the statements as many times as possible. I think that’s my idea of how to bring reflection and ambiguity into a genre, that encourages negativity and aggression, instead of wasting these sentiments by giving them an easy target. That is something, that has grown very important to me and that I hope to achieve.

Deathcore itself has grown and developed an awful lot since it first exploded. What are your views on the current state of the genre?

Micha: Pheew, honestly, I have no idea. You notice anyway, that the genre is in sort of a deep slumber, because I at least hardly notice any new bands from the genre.

Nils: As I mentioned, I think that the decrease of popularity of the genre may on the one hand be a sign of an exhaustion in the basic creative schemes of writing deathcore albums, but it may on the other hand give room to some new impulses. I think Spotify and the like, as how they intervene into our musical consumer habits, have an impact on the music scene, that I don’t yet fully understand and have reservations about predicting. But I think that there might be some substance in the stuff that a handful of bands (e.g. NEXILVA, LOATHE, LORNA SHORE or ENTERPRISE EARTH) do recently, other than just playing the game of brutality quantification. If there will ever be so much attention to the genre again, I cannot say, but it definitely has developed in a positive direction with regards to the quality of the music and the lyrics.

Following the release of the new record later this month, I imagine the focus will turn to touring. What are your touring plans for the near future?

Micha: As it is supposed to be, we mustn’t talk about some of the things by now [laughs]. We’re definitely going to play two more dates in Germany this year, before we’ll be heading over to Japan in December. We’re already super stoked about playing the new songs live and we hope to take as much touring and festivals as possible in 2019, hopefully also in UK, of course.

To close, we’ll offer you the floor. Do you have anything to say to the readers of Distorted Sound?

Micha: First and foremost thanks for your time and the interview, we appreciate it very much. The same of course goes out to all those reading this interview. Dead Era is out on September 28th, check out our pre-order, maybe there’s something in for you, we’d be happy!

Nils: I join the thanks and add some wisdom: Support your local scene and zines, don’t support your government, love music, hate fascism!

Dead Era is set for release on September 28th via Long Branch Records.

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