Mantar: Happy Accidents

“Death By Burning, Ode To The Flame, The Modern Art Of Setting Ablaze, Pain Is Forever And This Is The End, Post Apocalyptic Depression: show me another band with album titles that good!” Declares Hanno Klänhardt, one-half of black metal doom-punks MANTAR from his home office in Florida, getting as giddy as an adult at Disneyland over his new album’s title. “I hate to say it, but it sounds like fucking movies or books!”

It’s true, Klänhardt and drummer Erinç Sakarya never pull punches when it comes to titling albums. If you’re going to distil gritty grunge, pounding punk, and blistering black metal onto a singular piece of vinyl, you better back it up with the hard stuff. It trickles down to the song titles, too, which are themselves a reflection of the DIY attitude MANTAR adheres to.

“I imagine first how that would look on the back cover of a vinyl record: Absolute Ghost, Rex Perverso, Principle Of Command, Dogma Down, Halsgericht, fuck yeah,” he exclaims, coming up for air as little as Post Apocalyptic Depression does, continuing “Church Of Suck, what does that even mean? I have no idea what Church Of Suck is, but that’s the beauty of the English language; no rules apply, you can do whatever the fuck you want.”

If you ask Klänhardt, you’ve probably got that ‘whatever you want’ attitude to thank for receiving a new MANTAR record in the lord’s year of 2025. In fact, it’s lucky there’s even a MANTAR at all. After all, 2022’s Pain Is Forever And This Is The End nearly tore them apart.

“Making the previous album was such a painful, awful, dreadful experience, so we had quite a bit of talking to do as bandmates as well as friends,” he sighs, the pain of those near-death conversations still lingering. “Erinc came to Florida to shoot music videos for Pain Is Forever, and we talked a lot, like why was it so sucky this time? Why was it so tedious? And then we thought, hey, why do we have this band in the first place? And that’s in order to have fun.”

Rather than sit around in the Floridian sun feeling sorry for themselves, they bunkered down in a studio near where Klänhardt lived and jammed out covers like the old days. Who’d have thought GBH and WIRE could solve all the world’s problems?

“Making a new album was no plan whatsoever, it was more like a happy accident fired by the spark that we felt when we did those cover versions” he beams, ready to let loose on how his band cheated death. Again. “I was like ‘oh my god, this is so much fun’, like, this is how it’s supposed to feel. And then, pretty much on the spot, we wrote the new album. No song took longer to write than one hour, and we recorded the whole sucker pretty much live in a heartbeat; it was so quick and dirty.”

Post Apocalyptic Depression shifts MANTAR’s gears in the same way discovering fire fuelled the cavemen’s desire for evolution. But before they could leap forward, Klänhardt and Sakarya had to go backwards to debut album Death By Burning.

“I’ve never been so content and so in sync and so at peace than with what we’ve done with Post Apocalyptic Depression, because it just takes me back to the debut album, to Death By Burning. It has the same innocent, naive nature, because it was made out of a passion in order to raise some hell. No master plan, no safety net, we recorded everything live, we didn’t even bring our gear to the studio in order to force us to come up with something on the post. We tried to get rid of everything that we thought about how this band works, to make it dangerous again.”

One thing MANTAR hasn’t burnt down and rebuilt is its penchant for thought-provoking titles and lyrics. Whilst the title sounds cool, scratch below its surface and you’ll find a catch-22 that’ll keep your cranium awake all night. Seriously, what is a Post Apocalyptic Depression?

“Post Apocalyptic Depression is the rise and the dip between the apocalypses, but the next apocalypse is lingering around the corner, all created by humanity, like none of them is happening by accident, they’re all just self-inflicted” he says, swapping his punk-self for the philosophical one. “It’s like a never ending circle, because humans just refuse to learn from their mistakes. It’s like a Neitzche kind of thing, the Eternal Return.”

It’s that concept that helped create the cover art, complete with a party hat-adorning girl staring into the void. “I think people got so cynical and so numb over the years with all the bad news and shit happening in the world, that I think there might be some disappointment that the last apocalypse was not the final one. It’s like a doomsday disappointment, like you’re sitting in your bunker waiting for the world to end and then it was a regular everyday shitshow again.”

In many ways, the album’s striking artwork is a perfect depiction of MANTAR’s turbulent timeline. Like Icarus, they’re always playing too close to the sun – only they’re always careful not to get caught in its flames. Their flirtation with the death of their band isn’t seen negatively, nor are the experiences they’ve been through to make Post Apocalyptic Depression.

“This is what we wanted and what we needed. For us as a band, and for us as friends, it was a spiritual healing, and even if this is the last album of this band, which totally is a possibility, I’d much rather see this one be the last goodbye because it captures the essence of the band. This album is what MANTAR is in its true colours, in its honest fashion.”

Post Apocalyptic Depression is out now via Metal Blade Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS117 here: