Ingested: Undeniable

Cast your minds back to the early 2000s, the world was rife with an onslaught of high calibre bands melding together genres such as death metal, hardcore and other such destructive subtypes causing a seismic shift in the landscape of metal. One of the bands cutting their teeth in that hotly contested battleground was Manchester slam connoisseurs INGESTED.

Whilst some bands from that era have fallen by the wayside, frontman Jason Evans and company have continued to smash through every obstacle presented to them. “We feel like we’ve always had a point to prove. When we started we always felt like an afterthought and the underdogs. We were the ones that were ignored, told no all the time, told we weren’t good enough. We were the outcasts in a sea of outcasts and that gave us the drive to work so fucking hard that we’ve become undeniable. It’s like a big fuck you to the people who didn’t believe in us. You can’t ignore us now!”

The arrival of their seventh full-length release entitled The Tide Of Death And Fractured Dreams is drawing ever closer and after expelling their demons on their previous effort Ingested are geared up and ready to conquer. “Ashes Lie Still was born of a very dark period for us personally where we were all dealing with depression and various addictions,” explains Jason. “Sean [Hynes, guitars] was dealing with the death of his dad and it was genuinely just a shit time. This album is us coming out of that darkness with our faculties intact, feeling better and stronger than we’ve ever been. We feel like we’ve got everything off our chests and it was cathartic, like a therapy session. The mission for this album is just to tear your fucking head off. This is us swinging for the fences. This is us back to being those working class knobheads from Manchester with a chip on our shoulder and a fuck you attitude and we’ve come to kick your fucking head in!”

Their songs may be packed full of explosive heaviness but below the surface there lies a lot of personal sentiments intertwined within the lyrical content. Something which Jason hopes their listeners can confide in and relate to. “What we like to do is, even though the songs are about thoughts, feelings or experiences that have happened to us in our personal lives we like to frame them with a purposefully vague skin so that it’s not quite so obvious what I’m talking about. If someone starts listening and feels like they can apply it to themselves and what they’re going through if they’re dealing with any kind of hardship then that is so important for me. There are a lot of songs that have helped me in the past when I’ve been dealing with shit and it creates a special connection with a band that can’t be broken. It makes you feel like you’re not alone. I want to try and give something back to our fans that other bands gave me in my time of need.”

The placement of tracks within a body of work can completely alter the pacing and tone of an album, as years have gone by this is an element of their writing process which INGESTED have continued to refine and perfect. “We’ve started to approach albums as more of a musical journey,” discusses Jason. “Not necessarily narratively but making sure it has a beginning, middle and end, peaks and troughs and that has become super important to us. We used to just be like ‘right, lets write 10 banging tracks’ but we take a lot more care over the construction these days. We’re in a consistent cycle of writing all of the time and we’ve got piles and piles of ideas and it’s just finding the right building blocks so that everything sounds cohesive but also having strong songs which can stand individually.”

Having such a free flowing stream of creativity can be a blessing and a curse. Particularly when it comes to distinguishing one release from another and ensuring you are not retreading old steps. “It’s a tough line to tow as we always want people to listen to our music and immediately identify it as Ingested but we don’t want each album to sound the same either,” confirms Jason. “We’ve got an unwillingness to rest on our laurels, we never stay still and are always moving forwards. I always describe INGESTED as a musical shark. If it doesn’t keep moving, it’ll drown and die and because of that mentality we have we’re always trying to add more tools to the toolbox each time but it always has to make sense and not just for the sake of it. We do things on our terms and we’ve always done whatever the fuck we want. If we want clean singing we’ll have clean singing, if we want a guitar solo we’ll have a guitar solo. If you listen to Surpassing The Boundaries Of Human Suffering it is just straight up, brutal death metal and we’ve added all these different elements along the way. It’s been a gradual 18 year journey of expanding our sound, brick by brick. This band will end when we get bored and it becomes a chore. We’re not interested in fame or money. We just want to go around the world kicking everyone’s arse, raising hell like a death metal Stone Cold Steve Austin and creating a legacy we can all be proud of.”

Ingested have always had a knack for acquiring the services of top tier musicians to guest feature on their albums and The Tide Of Death And Fractured Dreams is no different. This one however, feels particularly special. “INGESTED and SYLOSIS grew up in the same UK scene and we’ve known Josh for ages. We’ve always wanted to get him on a track and the way we do guest vocals is we don’t just want to feel like it’s 20 seconds tacked onto a song for a bit of clout,” declares Jason. “We want them to contribute to the entire song. If you see a song in the pop charts it’s like SHAKIRA and BEYONCE where they both sing all the way through, you don’t see BEYONCE just turn up for a 15 second breakdown. We also don’t just want to shoehorn someone into a song either, it has to be the right fit and we found the perfect track for Josh. We sent him the track over and he sent it back like two hours later and of course he’d absolutely nailed it.”

“Mark from CHIMAIRA has always been a bucket list kind of feature for both me and Sean. The Impossibility Of Reason is in our all time, favourite albums and we’ve never had any dealings or connections with CHIMAIRA so we thought it’d never pan out. We were on a break from being in the studio and out of the blue he shouted us out on Twitter and we were losing our minds. A few days later we were recording In Nothingness and I’m listening to it back over and over and I knew something was missing. I thought ‘Mark would sound amazing on this’ and what was the worst he could say? No? We sent him the track and a couple of days later he replied and it sounded exactly like what we were hoping for. I used to go see them whenever they toured in Manchester and now it feels like it’s all come full circle!”

The Tide Of Death And Fractured Dreams is out now via Metal Blade Records. 

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