Horrendous: Joy In Death (Metal)
If you’ve spent any time exploring the weirder corners of death metal, you’ve probably come across HORRENDOUS. The Philly natives have spent over a decade now pushing at the boundaries of death metal, getting more expansive and stranger with every album that seemed to come to a head with 2018’s Idol, their least accessible and most experimental album they’d made. Its follow-up, 2023’s Ontological Mysterium, feels at first like a more straightforward prospect, but dig just under the surface of its duelling guitar melodies and love of classic heavy metal, and you’ll find the band are just as weird and avant garde as ever, so we had to sit down with guitarist and vocalist Matt Knox to lift the lid.
“This record in particular, we took a step outside of the norm and got really creative,” he grins. Any other band, that would sound contrived but HORRENDOUS mean it; “our goal was to be sneaky about how complex some of the music is,” he explains of Ontological Mysterium. It’s draped in more palatable tones, it sounds more immediate, and it’s even, dare we say it, accessible. “But at the same time, our most complex music is on this record, it’s just in smaller chunks. In terms of being a progressive band – I kind of hate that word, because I don’t think we sound like a progressive metal band at all – we’re progressive in the sense of really looking forward and pushing our own boundaries.”
The aforementioned classic metal influences make the album something of a love letter to that era of heavy metal, which Knox agrees was definitely the case on its creation. “Most of the people in the band, our favourite stuff is the 80s and 90s, that classic heavy metal, and in a way we’ve always been about trying to capture that spirit,” Matt muses, “it’s this element of being larger than life, being fun, but not like a hokey, cheesy thrash fun. It’s a joyousness.” The joyous feeling he describes certainly comes across not only musically, but in their lyrics as well.
As he tells it, where Idol often focused lyrically on being held back, or being oppressed by internal or external forces, Ontological Mysterium reckons with them in a direct way, it seeks to overcome them and find joy in freedom. As Knox describes, “the joy comes with a confrontation of a problem. It’s not that the dark side of life is absent, so much as it is conquering those things, and it’s meant to feel that as you’re listening, you’re taking part in that.” As certain as they are of the themes now, though, that actually wasn’t always the case; Knox explains that as time’s gone on and they’ve done more interviews and discussed the album further, that’s allowed his thoughts and analysis of the record to percolate further.
“It’s a wonderful chance as an artist to look back, see what you did; when you’re in the midst of making these things, you’re almost being guided by a force outside you,” he says, “and I’m just following this path, the movement and momentum of the work. When it’s finally done, you look back and say, holy shit, this is what it is once you’re no longer living inside of it any more.” That said, there are some deliberate choices made; the title of the album abbreviates to OM, often associated with spirituality, and as Knox explains, “it kind of resonated with the place we’re at, a place of complete creative freedom and a peace with ourselves and what we can do.”
When we ask about the spiritual connection, he points out that while HORRENDOUS themselves aren’t a band that are necessarily spiritual, a lot of their work finds some connection to it. “A lot of our work is concerned with gods, deities maybe more than religions but our music is a kind of spiritual thing we’re trying to make. The way we use melody is more about ecstaticism… I do think we’re after a spiritual experience from the music itself.”
The way they craft those experiences is often instinctual, improvisatory; many of the songs on Ontological Mysterium were composed through jam sessions together, rather than writing specific songs or parts together. “We still bring written stuff to the table, but when we get to the practice space it’s half an hour of plugging in and playing random stuff. It’s something as a band we’re incredibly strong at doing in a way I’d bet most metal bands aren’t, because they don’t practise it,” he grins on their penchant for improvisation. “Aurora Neoterica is just a jam we recorded and then added some layers and overdubs.”
Going forward, they want to keep doing this even more as they continue to chisel away and continue to realise the perfect HORRENDOUS sound he knows is out there somewhere; but whether or not they ever get there, he’s not so sure on. “I think we could, but it would mean the band has reached its outer limits, that would maybe mean the end of HORRENDOUS, and then we have to find a totally unexplored space to go,” Knox offers. He’s also unsure if they’d know if they got there. “We wouldn’t know it was until it was done. That’s part of the joy, working towards something, channelling our creativity and relinquishing control; there’s always one more star to reach for.”
Ontological Mysterium is out now via Season Of Mist.
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