Foretoken: Myth-Busting For Beginners

Myths are often seen as traditional stories that concern, and in some cases retell, the early history of a culture. They typically explain and explore natural or social phenomena and are almost always played out by a cast of supernatural beings. Whilst many have grown up groaning at another retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur, others have spent their time navigating the narratives and tracing their timelines to the present day. Mythology, much like the fantastical, goes hand-in-hand with some of the heavy metal realms, not least power and symphonic metal. However, it’s not often been the topical territory of a melodic death metal opus, and yet for Virginian duo FORETOKEN, their entire band is built on these legendary tales. Their debut album Ruin revisits the myths of our past to apply their hidden messages to our present, positing their evidence under the microscopic filter of sorrow and despair. For lyricist and vocalist Dan Cooley, there’s a lot more to the myths then meets the eye.

“We want to capture the feel of the culture from which the mythology comes from,” he explains enthusiastically. “For us, mythology is almost an insight into what the culture values and exemplifies, what the structure is and what are the things that governed that society, what led it to be how it is today.”

In many ways Ruin, and by extension FORETOKEN, is a platform in which the uninitiated can dive off of into the deep depths of culture and mythology. Across its six tracks, all telling a different story from a different culture, the album has the idea of humanity at the heart of its narration. “Hopefully it gives some more perspective on the human element of things, like for say, in Egyptian mythology, there was a focus on death and dying, and what to do up to the eventual end that you would see. There’s very much an emphasis on that, but in other cultures there’s not so much a heavy emphasis on death, so we wanted to explore what each of these cultures were saying about the same things and then the stories they used to impart those messages to their people.”

Much like the cultural leaders before them, Dan and multi-instrumentalist Steve Redmond are using FORETOKEN as their way of imparting the messages they’ve interpreted from the mythology they present. To achieve this, none of the songs specifically reference the character who’s narrating, therefore leaving it entirely open for the listener to immerse themselves directly in the story. “The idea was to allow the listener to implant themselves within the character so that they could see things how they’re happening through the characters eyes, and one of the reasons we wanted to have that as an element is, and this is just my opinion,  that sometimes music that is relating to mythology, it is delivered in a superficial way,” he says.

“We wanted this to be something where you had to identify a piece of the story that you knew from an ancillary component, like the song The Retribution, where we’re talking about Norse mythology. I say Fenrir, and we’re talking about the other gods, but we don’t actually say the name of who the character telling the story is, which is Tyr, so you would have to have knowledge of what the story is and who the characters in it are, and then you’d have that further understanding of what was going through that character’s mind as he was going through that situation.”

As is commonplace in the realms of melodic death metal, and FORETOKEN‘s conceptual contemporaries, Ruin is as grandiose and as cinematic in sound as it is in its subject matter. Crafting intricate landscapes awash with orchestral arrangements, bludgeoning blast beats, and masterful melodic fretwork; they use their lyrical interests as a way of drawing the listener further into the sound. “Fundamentally, what all these stories are about are just the human condition – so that’s conflict, and suffering, the meaning of life, and I guess to another extent, morality and what we make of it. We wanted to write something that was musically intricate and allowed people to get drawn into that story,” he says. “I’m very much a visual person, so when I listen to music I’ll sometimes imagine what’s happening – it could be intended, it could not be intended, it could be you know having to do with their lyrics, it could be having to do with how I imagine the lyrics playing out, or what I think when I hear the lyrics, and what I wanted to do with FORETOKEN was make it very clear as to what I’m seeing in my head, which is the playing out of a cinematic story, something along the lines of Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, or any of those movies of that extent.”

Setting the sights on shores as epic and as illustrious as the fabled worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, FORETOKEN had to find a way to flesh out their ‘out of the apartment’ sound. For them, this meant enlisting the helping hands of a couple of extreme metal’s heavy hitters; the first being journeyman drummer Hannes Grossmann [NECROPHAGIST, TRIPTYKON, OBSCURA]. 

“It was on a whim – Steve and I were just speaking about having programmed drums, and then we thought, well, these drums just don’t have that human element to it, and when you’re programming drums, you don’t always have the creativity come across that a normal drummer would be bringing to a project. So we thought, well, what if we had Hannes Grosseman jokingly, and then I suggested in a more serious tone, what if we actually did, so we just messaged him and he said he was willing to join us on the project and it went from there.”

Hannes adds a depth of desolation to their directors cut, which was made to sound as crystal and as clear in the mix as possible by their fellow conspirator, producer Jacob Hansen [FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE, THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, VOLBEAT]. Bringing Jacob on board for the mastering and mixing of Ruin was a learning curve unlike no other for the band used to simply throwing their death metal at the wall and hoping it sticks. 

“With working with Jacob, we could’ve done things a little better. Coming into the mixing and mastering process from a position such as ours, we didn’t really have an understanding of the amount of lead time we needed to fit into his schedule, so we in essence had to be patient with his schedule, and now knowing what we know now, which is lead-up time is everything, working with Hannes and with Jacob is going to be a lot easier, because we have that understanding of what they have going on.”

Ultimately, working with both Hannes and Jacob allowed Dan and Steve to develop FORETOKEN into the vision they had let their minds create, crafting a unique blend of melodic death metal, black metal, folk metal, and symphonic metal. In doing so, they’ve eclipsed elements of their genres traditional tropes, such as track-times, turning out two that clock in at over ten minutes long. This ambitious jump was a challenge unlike any other in itself. “We wanted to make sure that the listener was as intrigued and engaged from one second as they are ten minutes in, and so that required us to really think about how we structured the songs as well as how we ordered the songs because we wanted to make sure we were constantly providing enough things to keep the listener really engaged with what we were playing.”

You’d be forgiven for assuming the challenge was in maintaining their listener’s attention across their epic expanses, when in fact the true challenge for the band was allowing this not to come at odds with their desire to let the tracks evolve naturally. “Letting the tracks breathe, and seeing how we could not limit ourselves by the length of the song, you know,  just let them unfold to their logical conclusion, that was a challenge for us and an experiment we wanted to do,” he explains. “Very early on in the writing process, and I hate to use the term ballad here, but we wanted to write more epic and grandiose songs and typically those by default happen to be longer by their nature, and we wanted to explore that territory, and with Ruin we were able to do that successfully. In the future, we’re looking at scaling things back a bit because those 10 minute songs are quite challenging, and we want to be a bit more in line with something that’s a little more workable.”

Whilst their plans for scaling back their sonic approach is one thing, they’re also looking into the possibilities this provides in terms of exploring the mythology of other cultures further. Whilst they’re somewhat repeating the stories of time gone by, they’re not on board with repeating their own ruminations. “When you’re writing lyrics for a song that is that long, you have to have enough subject matter to fill the gaps and with the stories that we’ve chosen, there is a challenge to stretch them to that length, and within mythology, there are only a few stories you could tell that fit that mould without repeating yourself. We don’t want to tell the same story twice. For example, with the Iliad, and Achilles, we don’t want to revisit the Iliad and Achilles again, as there’s other things we could talk about, and so if we were to write say another song of that length, a story like the Iliad would be ideal, but we don’t want to touch on that itself again as we’ve used up all the information the first time round.”

Information, it seems, is an element of Ruin that is unforgiving in its sagaciousness. It’s something that Dan has attended to meticulously throughout the album, ensuring it’s tales are as authentic and as close to the source material as possible. Whether it’s tackling the god of the dead in Irish mythology on Indelibility of Inequity or the fantastical Russian fairytale of Koschei the Deathless on A Deathless Prison, FORETOKEN take their subject matter as seriously as their sound.

“I need to understand these stories, there can’t be any misinterpretation of what these myths are supposed to tell. I wanted to make sure that we captured as much information as possible so we could be truthful to the myths and the cultures that they come from, however that being said, there were areas where we could trim the fat, so to speak, and take out the parts that were excessive. We did that with the track A Deathless Prison, which is about Koschei the Deathless, which comes from Russian mythology, and there are bits of it which are too fantastical for metal in my opinion –  it has talking horses and animals, and there’s all sorts of things that might not fit with metal as a genre, at least with the genre we’ve decided to play music towards, so we had to avoid certain aspects of it.”

Ruin is the work of a band with a vision, one which FORETOKEN achieve in their undeniable dedication to detail. If you’ve ever wondered about the ways in which those old school days studying mythology could’ve been done better, this is certainly one way to try. 

Ruin is out now via Prosthetic Records. 

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