Anaal Nathrakh: Pray For Oblivion
ANAAL NATHRAKH have been blending just about every metal subgenre into one cacophony of visceral heaviness and addictive melody for more than twenty years. The two-piece are continuing to push extreme metal to its limits with their eleventh album, Endarkenment, released via Metal Blade Records.
Arguably, ANAAL NATHRAKH are at the top of their game right now. Vocalist Dave Hunt is certain that we can expect “an exceedingly stimulating set of new songs” from Endarkenment. “I could go on about ‘a rollercoaster ride of white-hot metal, compelling melody crashing into agonised blah blah blah’ but it’d be basically meaningless,” he explains. “But I’m not an ad copy writer. Obviously I’m just going to say good things, because if we didn’t think it was brilliant, we wouldn’t be releasing it.” Fair point.
While Mick Kenney is in charge of all things composition, it is Dave who controls the lyrical side of the band. While ANAAL NATHRAKH have almost always avoided publishing their lyrics, they’re still an integral part of the end result. Endarkenment might not be a full-on concept album, but one key idea flows throughout. “We are living through a kind of opposite of the Enlightenment, with an increasing return to the rejection of objectivity and rationality, and a return to ignorance and superstition,” he explains. He also offers a TLDR explanation: “To put it bluntly, I think the world is more than a little fucked at the moment.”
Dave also provides the band’s astonishingly acrobatic vocals. You’d be forgiven for thinking that ANAAL NATHRAKH have about six different frontmen or that they collaborate with a revolving cast of trained singers – that couldn’t be further from the truth. “Mick sent me a video of a vocal coach chap analysing one of our songs, explaining how he thought I’d done it all,” says Dave. The video in question analyses his ability to shift from distortion-heavy screams, to ear-piercing, KING DIAMOND-esque wails and moments of operatic, melodic bliss. He makes it sound like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Dave should take some sort of credit for his incredible skill, especially after twenty years at the top of his game. Instead, he downplays it. “What I really did was make it up as I went along. Just like everything else.”
Despite changes in vocal style coming as quickly as the blast beats on Hold Your Children Close And Pray For Oblivion, ANAAL NATHRAKH have always maintained a consistent, recognisable sound. The likes of CATTLE DECAPITATION and DIMMU BORGIR might be known for their ability to marry melody and brutality, but no one does it quite like ANAAL NATHRAKH. “When we were starting out, there were bands like MAYHEM, ARCTURUS, EXTREME NOISE TERROR and KING DIAMOND that were in our heads and fed into how we saw what we wanted to do, but since then, we’ve mostly just followed what we felt was the right thing to do,” explains Dave. “On a creative level, we’re basically out on our own.”
Despite their sound often sitting in the upper echelons of auditory evil, Dave still makes time for light-heartedness in his lyrics. “We do have a touch of the surreal sometimes, and there are touches of sardonic humour. In fact, there’s a Monty Python reference in The Age Of Starlight Ends,” he explains. With that in mind, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the upcoming Libidinous (A Pig With Cocks In Its Eyes) might not be their most earnest track, but Dave clarifies that “it’s perfectly serious. As is the album artwork that depicts the same thing. It’s intended as a metaphor for the position of the human agent in 21st century Western society.”
COVID-19 brought the music industry to a standstill and impacted just about every band in the world, regardless of genre. ANAAL NATHRAKH, however, had finished writing Endarkenment long before leaving the house became a distant memory. Not that it would have made a whole lot of difference. “We each mostly stick to what we’re best at, so aside from the occasional suggestion we might make to one another, Mick does the music and I do the lyrics and conceptual stuff,” explains Dave. “No sitting in the same room required, so no impact from the virus.” That’s not to say that COVID won’t show up in some form in a future ANAAL NATHRAKH release: “It might change what we write, because we draw on stuff that’s informed by what happens in the world.”
And it’s clear that what they write is the side of things that Dave is most interested in. As with every ANAAL NATHRAKH album, the pair didn’t have many recording requirements; how they did it wasn’t much of a concern. “A bare bones setup in an industrial unit is much the same to us as the studio we recorded in at Maida Vale,” Dave says. “When it comes to ANAAL NATHRAKH, we can strip everything down to the essentials, add in anything we need to make what we have in our heads, and that’s it.”
He might downplay the skill behind his own vocal technique, but Dave certainly doesn’t lack confidence in his band’s output. At the time of writing, the title track (Endarkenment) is all we had heard from the album, and Dave describes it with poignant simplicity. “We think it’s brilliant.” In fairness, it is. Scorching aggression oozes from every instrument, while Dave is on hand to shift between indecipherable screams and the operatic earworm of a chorus. His powerful lyric, ‘take what small comfort there may be left’, seems to have inadvertently become the mantra of 2020.
The video that accompanies the track fits the distinctly COVID-ian trend of being mostly animated, with Dave explaining that “the song seemed a perfect fit for some of the up to date themes that we could work into a video.” At one point, we see an angry pig commanding his subjects to drink bleach. It’s a dark, dystopian image reminiscent of the bleak realities predicted by George Orwell’s Animal Farm and PINK FLOYD’s Animals, only now it has actually happened. The fact that Trump hadn’t yet suggested that people should inject disinfectant to fight COVID-19 (no, you aren’t living inside a nightmare – he actually said that) by the time Endarkenment was written adds to Dave’s suggestion that “the way the world has changed since we recorded the album has made it actually fit the zeitgeist even more than it would have otherwise.”
Back when we could still gleefully join a circle pit, ANNAL NATHRAKH were known for the engaging live presence that they first started work on in 2004. Despite sixteen years of touring having passed since then, Dave still remembers their first show fondly. “We had Shane and Danny from NAPALM DEATH as our bass player and drummer, and apparently Devin Townsend and Gene Hoglan came down to see us. They probably thought we were a shit racket, they were only there to see their mates I think, but it was still a nice thing for your first show.” Well, whether or not Devin thought they were indeed a “shit racket” back in 2004, it seems that he had evolved into a fan by 2017, tweeting that he was listening to both ANAAL NATHRAKH and Icelandic duo KIASMOS.
Anyway, that first show came at a time when ANAAL NATHRAKH were a relatively straightforward black metal band with just two underappreciated albums under their belt. They’ve obviously developed since then, but Dave can’t quite put his finger on how. “Other than me saying we’re much better now, I’m not very well placed to answer that question. To us, this album sounds like this album, the last one sounds like the last one, and so on. You need a bit more detachment to judge stuff like that.” Those more detached ANAAL NATHRAKH fans would probably say that they have become more focused, more progressive, more structured, and yes, much better.
These changes in style slot into Dave’s own creative ethos. “People like predictability and comfort zones,” he says. “There’s often a strong vibe I get from people who like to approach things as if by saying ‘ah, this again, I know where I am with this, that’s nice, let’s do this dance again’. I don’t like being approached that way.” Luckily, fans of ANAAL NATHRAKH aren’t looking for a comfort zone. They want to strap in for a bumpy journey towards a new, abrasive sound. In fact, it’s a bit of a paradox; probably the least predictable thing the band could do is stay the same.
Musing on what he has learned by being involved in extreme metal for more than twenty years, Dave realises that no matter how he wants his music to be perceived, he is guilty of doing the very same thing. “KING DIAMOND is playing? I hope he plays all the same old songs I want to hear him play! I suppose the lesson there is either that the world is annoying and lacks novelty, or that I’m a demanding yet hypocritical arsehole.”
Endarkenment is out now via Metal Blade Records.
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