Exodus: The Years Of Death And Dying

EXODUS drummer Tom Hunting is a cheerful guy. Joining us on a Zoom call, the veteran sticks-man smiles constantly, cracks jokes and laughs easily. He’s an easy-going, amiable metalhead and time passes easily in his company. And he’s partly responsible for one of the filthiest, nastiest albums to crawl out of the thrash metal scene since; well, since the last EXODUS record.

Persona Non Grata is the Bay Area quintet’s eleventh album and one of the heaviest they’ve ever made. Since reforming near the turn of the millennium, they’ve got more vicious with every successive release. Their songs have been inspired by mass shootings, acts of genocide, serial killers and drug addiction. EXODUS don’t make pleasant music, but they are dab hands at making brutally in-your-face thrash that’s so violent, it borders on full-blown extreme metal.

“It’s very organic, we don’t plan anything. It just happens,” Tom laughs as he reflects on this. “Probably the evolution I guess is that when Shovel Headed Kill Machine came out, the band started going in a more extreme kind of direction and people liked it so we did more of it. Exhibit A came along and we thought ‘let’s go real dark on this one too’. It wasn’t planned, I don’t know why it happened but people like it.”

They certainly do. Take a trip to YouTube and check out the footage of their performance at Wacken Open Air from 2008. The response from the crowd is so deliriously unhinged, the pit starts to resemble the Battle Of Helm’s Deep. That was over a decade ago and things haven’t calmed down one bit. EXODUS shows are wild affairs and when worldwide touring returns again, they’ve got some fresh material to show off.

The Beatings Will Continue (Until Morale Improves) for instance is likely to be the first. A fast, rabid slab of violence, it’s made for the live arena and should send fans worldwide into a frenzy. Clocking in at three minutes and one second total runtime, it’s one of the shortest songs they’ve ever written. And that was very much intentional.

“We trimmed the fat on it. Originally it was 3:20. We were trying to get it under three minutes, we were kinda joking when editing the basic tracks ‘you know, ELVIS PRESLEY never had a song over three minutes,’ I don’t think, maybe later in his career, all the old hits were like 2:56, 2:48. I added this ‘one two three four’ at the beginning, we had this old Yamaha drum machine and we got the voice from that and we even almost took that out because it would trim it down even more.”

Elsewhere, there are more classic EXODUS anthems like Slipping Into Madness and the title track, but there’s a rare moment of poignancy to be found too. The Years Of Death And Dying is on the surface another intense slammer, but there’s more to it than meets the eye.

“It was a poem I started writing in 2017. All these rock stars had been dying, we lost BOWIE, ARETHA FRANKLIN, PRINCE and we lost people in our own orbit, friends, family,” he says, “So I started writing and it was kind of, like from the Grim Reaper’s point of view. I take you out when I’m ready, not when you’re ready. It’s a cheery little Grim Reaper song. We lost a good friend, Riley Gale from POWER TRIP. There’s so much innuendo in that song, ‘when a gale force wind blows’, that’s an ode to Riley Gale. ‘You’ll wither when I’m near,’ that’s Pete Withers, there’s a lot of fallen heroes and the song’s a tribute to them.”

Mercifully, despite being diagnosed with Squamous Cell Carcinoma (a type of cancer) in February of this year, Tom himself looks to be on the mend. His own brush with mortality must have been terrifying, but he brushes it off with trademark humour. “I’m doing pretty good you know. 2021 happened and oh shit we’re off the rails, but I’m doing all right. They can’t find cancer in me right now so that’s good. And they’re looking hard! They’re poking and prodding and doing lots of blood tests, but right now my markers and margins are awesome.”

Having survived the health scare, he’s now keen to get out and start playing again. But despite being a rock star since his early twenties, he’s still a fan at heart and he can barely contain himself when discussing a career highlight. “My friend bought IRON MAIDEN’s debut in a record store in Berkeley, California just because of the picture of Eddie. He brought that home and nobody in the Bay Area had heard of IRON MAIDEN. But Berkeley happened to have an import section, he brought that record home and three weeks later we were playing some of that shit in people’s backyards. They thought Running Free was an original EXODUS song and we had to say ‘no it’s a cover.’ Fast forward to 2011 and on my birthday, April 10th, we’re playing with IRON MAIDEN in a soccer stadium in Chile and I was like wow, bucket list, check!”

So, with a blistering new record ready to go, it’s a good time to be an EXODUS fan. And while the focus is firmly on touring the hell out of Persona Non Grata, don’t be surprised if we get something even bigger in the next few years. The band are still on good terms with former singer Rob Dukes and Tom’s not against a special tour with two vocalists sharing the stage.

“There’s such a large history of music, such a big catalogue. It’s hard for us to write a setlist because everyone wants a particular song, it’s hard to please everybody. Someday, when it’s closer to this all being over, we’ll do a tour with both singers. I think it’d be fun. I don’t know about an album but definitely a tour. I don’t know, maybe an album. Never say never.”

Persona Non Grata is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

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