Armed For Apocalypse: Beneath The Blasters

Although the exact nature of what disaster is going to wipe us all from this planet is still unknown, post-metal sludge lords ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE have a pretty good method of how to gear up against our increasingly scary reality: “just fill your head with riffs.” And their fourth album, The Earth Is Breathing Beneath Me, is rammed with so many suffocatingly dense and grooved-out riffs, it’s practically an apocalyptic armoury.

“It’s the idea that everything beneath us is living and we’re all just a part of it,” vocalist/guitarist Nate Burman says. “Funnily enough, our bass player thought that it was from a Final Fantasy game – because I’m kind of a Final Fantasy nerd. But I don’t know where it came from.” Nate can’t quite believe it’s been four years since their third album, Ritual Violence, which was widely acclaimed as one of the heaviest sludge albums of 2022. How do you follow such a devastating success? “Well, maybe with The Earth Is Breathing Beneath Me being just one of the best ones of 2026,” Nate laughs. Recorded once again with CONVERGE’s guitarist/producer, Kurt Ballou, at God City Studios, it’s an album that crushes with foreboding precision and sees ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE warp their CROWBAR-esque bludgeoning thickness into a sound very much their own.

There have been many points over the years where ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE thought they may not release another album or down another blaster together before a show. Divorces, family changes, day jobs, lineup overhauls, multiple losses and being on different continents are just some of the challenges the band have had to endure. “Nick [Harris], our drummer, was living in Spain for a couple of years. I was in Portland. And then the rest of the guys were in California, so it was hard; it almost broke us, but we made it work. I think it was the moment when Nick got sober in Spain that he was like, ‘What am I doing here? What I want to be doing is playing music.’ He was part-owner of a bar restaurant there, and he made the decision that day to move back to Portland.”

Nate, Nick and bassist Charlie Fischer are now all based in Portland, Oregon, with guitarist Cayle Hunter out in California with a job and family that he can’t really step away from to go grind it out on the road. “Cayle doesn’t tour with us, but he is still part of the writing process. He and I will just write demos, program drums and get song outlines and send those back and forth,” Nate explains. Since the band spent so long living in different places, they’ve gotten used to an almost entirely virtual style of songwriting, which is also more productive than trying to get together to bash out songs in person, especially with the added responsibilities of adulthood.

So there may not be so many ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE song-writing jamming sessions, but they are getting some great creative inspiration in a slightly different location: beneath the bed covers. “I have written riffs in my sleep before,” Nate laughs. Where some people say they could “do it in their sleep” to metaphorically exaggerate their capabilities, Nate means it oh-so-literally. “That’s a weird one, to wake up and have to voice memo it into your phone. And it sounds so dumb when you listen back to it. But you need it.” He also dreamt up the visuals for the music video for one of their latest singles, IMMORTAL, where a woman is stuck in a nightmare, unable to wake up, symbolised by her reaching for the light and being antagonised by a sleep paralysis demon. Stay tuned for what Nate Burman might dream up next.

And now, back to the blasters. ARMED FOR APOCALYPSE have a pre-show tradition that involves downing drinks of part-beer, part-Red Bull. “So, blasters are essentially vodka and Red Bull. You slam it, and it gets you pumped up. There was a tour we were on where we were really broke, and the venues would give us beer every night for free. And so we ended up just doing beer blasters. But Nick is sober, so he’ll do like a coffee blaster or an NA beer blaster.” Nate clarifies that a coffee blaster is just coffee, without any Red Bull, because that would be insane and who knows what time signature Nick might take their set to with that amount of caffeine.

“We used to party a lot more; we’re a little more responsible these days. But I remember specifically a show that we played with 36 CRAZYFISTS in Chico after our UK tour with them in 2013, at this place called Lost on Main, where they had these signature blasters that were like a triple shot of raspberry vodka in a pint glass with a full red bull. We did too many blasters and were all too drunk: I fell back into the drums, Cayle was on the ground trying to get the batteries for his wireless and Kirk’s [Williams, ex-singer] cables kept coming unplugged. That show was one of the worst shows we’ve ever played. I’m sure they were all looking at each other like, is this the same band we toured with? So that was a lesson for sure, holy shit. And we didn’t get booed off the stage, but I wanted to get off the stage!”

The Earth Is Breathing Beneath Me is out now via Church Road Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS129 here.

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