Mammon’s Throne: At The Threshold of Creativity
“My body to the worms, the wind whistles through my bones, my grave an unmarked stone, and finally I’m alone”. It is a striking image to lift from your own lyrics and plaster across the front of your album: it’s final, visceral, and unsparing. Pulled from the final passage of album closer Departed, it announces exactly the kind of record MAMMON’S THRONE want their third album, My Body To The Worms to be: heavy, dark, and uninterested in offering comfort. Whether it fully delivers on that promise is a more complicated question.
The Sydney five-piece have spent the better part of a decade building towards this moment. Vocalist Matthew Miller is candid about how long that has taken. “If we go back to our first album, Forward Unto Flame, we hadn’t really found our ideal sound yet,” he says. “We came from a very stoner, doom-heavy scene here in Australia and we were playing more towards those kinds of bands.” The 2023 self-titled record pushed further into death and black metal territory and earned them serious attention. Now, signed to Hammerheart Records and with their longest and most varied record to date behind them, the question is whether they’ve found that sound or are still searching for it.
My Body To The Worms is at its best when Miller, bassist Sam Talbot-Canon, drummer Nick Boschan, and guitarists Amesh Perera and Johnny Chammas, stop worrying about genre conventions and follow the song wherever it leads. “We don’t think too hard about it, we just write to what we think the song needs, and we’re not afraid to use a different genre than the song started with to where it ends up,” says Miller. That instinct pays off most spectacularly on Departed, a gothic western ballad that builds to a black metal crescendo and is comfortably the most distinctive thing they have committed to record. “With Departed, I think we’ve always wanted to do one that is that gothic western style, because I’m a big fan of FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM, and Johnny and I are huge fans of WAYFARER, and I’ve been listening to NICK CAVE for a long, long time,” Miller explains. The song earns every one of its six minutes and forty-two seconds, which is not something that can be said for every track here.
Because for all its ambition, My Body To The Worms is an uneven record. Senseless Death and Every Day More Sickened are the band’s first excursions past the nine-minute mark, and while the latter earns its runtime, the former takes considerable patience before it finds its footing. The influence of The Peaceville Three – ANATHEMA, MY DYING BRIDE, and PARADISE LOST – that runs through the album’s DNA is worn most heavily on its sleeve in these longer pieces, and at times MAMMON’S THRONE feel more like gifted students of the genre than a band fully owning it. Miller is lyrically sharp – “awash with burning disgust, as lambs are fed to the wolves, feeding the maw, opened so wide, all are digested inside” deserves a delivery that matches its weight – but the mix does not always do those moments justice. Talbot-Canon notes that the album better captures “the sound you get from a Mammon’s Throne live gig,” and that may be precisely the issue: a band whose power is palpable on stage is still working out how to translate it fully to record.
The introduction of hardcore elements, namely breakdowns, on the Vampire-inspired Elixir has spawned the self-coined genre tag funeral slam, which the band are clearly enthusiastic about. “It’s something we’d like to explore a bit further and get the nascent genre of funeral slam a bit more air beneath its wings,” says Talbot-Canon. The concept is fun, but on record Elixir sits closer to solid than revelatory. The vampire premise is vivid on paper, yet it never quite haunts the way the best death-doom does.
Where the album genuinely impresses is in its evidence of a band willing to back their instincts. Mastered by Fredrik Nordström, whose fingerprints are on records by AT THE GATES, IN FLAMES, and OPETH, the overall sound is sharper and more defined than anything in their back catalogue. “He just made it so crisp and crushing which is what we were after,” says Miller. Yet for a band speaking with such confidence about having finally captured their sound, the conversation shifts revealingly when the subject turns to what comes next. Shorter songs are on the agenda, with more digestible entry points and tracks that fit neatly into a half-hour set. “It’s not so much pandering to shorter attention spans, but it’s thinking of ways in which you can have certain tracks that stand out a little bit and are more digestible,” Talbot-Canon explains carefully. It is a reasonable creative ambition, but it sits awkwardly alongside the assertion that My Body To The Worms represents the fullest realisation of what MAMMON’S THRONE are. Bands who have truly found their sound rarely immediately start redesigning it.
My Body To The Worms is a record that shows you clearly what MAMMON’S THRONE are capable of, even when it stops short of fully realising it. When asked what listeners should take from the album, Miller defers to an unlikely authority. “I don’t know if you’re a Peep Show fan, but to quote Super Hans: a powerful sense of dread.” Talbot-Canon is content to let that stand. “I don’t think I can offer anything more insightful than Super Hans’ wisdom there.”
It is, fittingly, the most honest moment in the whole conversation, because Super Hans, for all his chaos and contradiction, had a habit of stumbling onto the truth when he least intended to. So do MAMMON’S THRONE. My Body To The Worms is the sound of a band getting close enough to taste it, even if they haven’t quite drained the glass yet.
My Body to the Worms is out now via Hammerheart Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS128 here:
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