Hellripper: Highlands To Hell
HELLRIPPER had already won the global pandemic’s parade of new music. 2020’s The Affair Of The Poisons helped blast the doors wide open with a breakthrough barrage of blackened thrash and speed. The pressure was off, so the slippers could slide on. But as HELLRIPPER mastermind James McBain explains, there’s no rest for the wicked as he started work on its follow-up, Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags during Winter 2020.
“I originally wrote two or three songs for the album, and they were similar to the older HELLRIPPER stuff, and I listened back to them, and they just sounded uninspired and forced,” McBain sighs, as he returns to the time he found himself divinely uninspired to a hellish extent. “They sounded like HELLRIPPER songs, just not as good as what I had previously written, so I decided to just delete them.”
It turns out pushing the red button like a political leader following through on idle threats is all it takes to open the floodgates. Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags was written in six months and took over a year to record. But it began with breaking out of their own boundaries.
“I thought I needed to go in a new direction, I needed to try something different, and see what’ll inspire me and make the songs good again,” admits McBain with a sly chuckle, before indulging the influences that have pushed HELLRIPPER into brave new worlds. “As well as the usual like METALLICA, ANNIHILATOR, DARKTHRONE, VENOM, MIDNIGHT, I’ve been listening to a lot of bands like AGALLOCH, EDGE OF SANITY, OPETH, TRBULATION, TYPE O NEGATIVE.”
So, business as usual then, really? Well, no, not quite. “I was listening to a lot of non-metal stuff too, so a lot of the classics like AC/DC and LED ZEPPELIN, THE DOORS and THE BEATLES, and over the last year a lot of 90s music like ALICE IN CHAINS, NIRVANA, OASIS, MANIC STREET PREACHERS – it was fun listening to all this stuff and trying to incorporate that influence into a black thrash, black speed sound without diluting the end result.”
Sure, you probably didn’t have a bar fight between OPETH, OASIS, and THE BEATLES on your sweepstakes list for a HELLRIPPER record, but it’s what you’ve got. Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags injects the black thrash bonanza with the NWOBHM choruses and riffs to kick out to, and the progressive metal soundscapes to lose yourself in. But for all its cauldron complexities, it all boils down to the simple things.
“I was inspired to try different things, whether it was the song structures, like listening to THE BEATLES and what they would do with song structures, or a lot of the production is in this OASIS and MANIC STREET PREACHERS style, with a lot of atmospheric sounding high guitars to give it an atmospheric edge – I didn’t want to limit myself too much, just wanted to explore all my influences that I hadn’t really thought about when writing music for HELLRIPPER.”
From Goat Vomit Nightmare’s neck-snapping scissor-kick intensity to Mester Stoor Worm’s monstrous, mountain-climbing finale, Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags positions HELLRIPPER as heavy metal’s mad scientist. You might think there’s method to the madness, but most of it came from happy accidents.
Much like the music it narrates, Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags lyrical narration sees McBain step out of his comfort zone, embracing his homegrown roots in the process. “So, near the end of the writing process for The Affair Of The Poisons, I moved to the Scottish Highlands. Usually, my environment doesn’t affect my songwriting, but just being in the highlands, surrounded by all the landscapes and scenery inspired me to look into Scottish folklore and history, but the darker side, not the traditional kind of stuff but sea serpents, and the Nucklavee, and the devil in Scotland.”
What was supposed to be a song or two soon became an album of Scottish folklore and history, which McBain feels is “something a bit different for black speed metal, I don’t think there’s many songs based on this kind of thing.”
It doesn’t just dip its toes in Scottish history, it submerges itself in it. Its title is taken from a line in the national poet of Scotland, Robert Burns’ poem Address To The Devil. “The original poem is a sort of humorous poem mocking the devil, downplaying the devil’s power and stuff like that whereas I switched the perspective and it’s more of a devil worship song, using references to the poems.”
Beyond referencing Robert Burns and Orcadian folklore, McBain has taken HELLRIPPER into a more personal realm on Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags, referencing Scottish clan culture throughout – going as far as using his own family crest in its album art. “I wanted to incorporate the clan culture element into the aesthetic of everything, so on the back you’ve got the McBain clan crest, which is a wildcat holding a Targe, which is a Scottish shield, and with the motto ‘touch not a cat but a targe’ which is ‘do not touch a cat without a shield.’”
“I wanted to put that on the album to make it a bit more personal to me since it’s a solo project, and from there I wanted to do a HELLRIPPER clan crest, so of course I took the McBain clan crest and motto and changed it to a Goat fitting with HELLRIPPER’s aesthetic.”
For an album born out of the pain of writing through a pandemic, Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags is HELLRIPPER’s soundtrack to opening a hole in the grounds of the Scottish Highlands all the way to the gates of hell. And that nightmare’s never sounded better.
Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags is out now via Peaceville Records.
Like HELLRIPPER on Facebook.