INTERVIEW: Negative Thought Process
Bloodstock has an incredible reputation for having its ear to the ground with regards to the new blood of the metal scene, hence why they have an entire stage dedicated to it! No other band quite laid waste to the Hobgoblin New Blood Stage quite like Reading’s own NEGATIVE THOUGHT PROCESS, and we had the chance to sit down with them before their absolutely killer set. Guitarist and vocalist Danny Page, bassist Kyle Townsend and drummer Tyler Hodges all come across as not what you’d expect from one of the angriest bands in Britain.
How did the Metal 2 The Masses competition happen for NEGATIVE THOUGHT PROCESS?
Danny: It’s funny because Kyle and I have been in the Reading scene for ages and ages, and we’ve been playing gigs, like we’ve done some of the Metal 2 The Masses before. We know the promoter and had been playing gigs and have played Metal 2 The Masses before, and someone just said “why don’t you guys enter?” We didn’t really see how good it was getting because somehow we got through, and the bands were really good in our heats, we couldn’t tell who was going through.
Kyle: We went into that competition with absolutely zero expectation. The grind scene in Reading is building but its not really massive. We just thought that not many people will turn up, we’ll play to our mates, it’ll be fine cause a gig is a gig. Then we got through to the final and we were like “shit, this is actually happening!” Then when Simon called out our name I just dropped to the floor, I couldn’t believe it! Every single band we played with, the standard was so high in that competition, so it was a surprise for us to come out on top especially considering that we’re away from the norm.
Danny: We played the shortest songs with the most extreme noisy feedback.
How difficult is it to be in a band like NEGATIVE THOUGHT PROCESS when there isn’t really a scene for it?
Danny: We basically just build the scene ourselves. Kyle has been putting on gigs in reading with bands we know from up north and around the area. We basically just wanted to DIY it, if we can’t get people to book us we’ll just book ourselves, y’know, it doesn’t matter. Like Wayne’s World said “if you build it, they will come bruv”.
Kyle: I totally agree with that, but it helps that we know people around the country and they’ve been inviting us around to places where there is more a scene for [grindcore]. Like up in Leeds, it’s like our second home, there was actually a point when we had played Leeds more than we had played Reading.
Danny: Some people thought we were a Leeds band because we played there so much. We have so many mates up there and the scene is so much stronger up there. Like you have GETS WORSE from up there, then you have like LEECHED from Manchester, and then from Scotland you have like ENDLESS SWARM. We did a first tour with LEECHED when they were first playing down south and they opened for us and there was a few times when they didn’t have much material, they would only play for 10 minutes and everytime we would just be like fuck.
Kyle: That was the whole thing, it was [LEECHED] second show ever with the current line up and all of us just stood back and went like “oh shit”.
Given that NEGATIVE THOUGHT PROCESS are quite a new band, how did the band come to be?
Danny: It was weird. I started the band in my bedroom, cause i’ve always been in quite a few bands, I’ve been in black metal bands, doom bands, a whole mixture of stuff, and I just wanted to write something a bit harder. I started to get into a lot more crust, I had been listening to grindcore for ages but I was being introduced to bands like DOOM and EXTINCTION OF MANKIND, and I was getting more into hardcore and crossover. The I bought a HM2 amp off my mate, so I wrote this first initial thing in 2015, and I wrote this album worth of stuff and put it up on Facebook, and Kyle and I had been in and out of bands across the scene and he just messaged me asking “do you need a bass player? Please tell me you need a bass player”.
Kyle: All I saw were the words “one man grind band” and I was like nah, that needs to be two. I had been listening to grind for so long, wanted to be in a band, listened to NAILS too much and Danny came up with this HM2 stuff and just posted up on Facebook and mentioned he just wanted to stick to the studio. Then he mentioned he was going to play a show and then I pestered him some more, near enough everyday, until he was like yeah alright, let’s just go for a jam and see where it goes from there.
What is it about grindcore that made you want to play in bands like this?
Kyle: It’s just the sheer power, anger and I dunno, it’s just a sound that fits my personality. I’m a bit all over the place and a bit messy so it just fits so well. Getting up on stage with blast beats behind you, you just get pumped and run round the stage like a maniac is the best thing to do.
Tyler: Cry on the floor like a baby.
Kyle: Or cry like a baby on the floor, I love it.
How do you channel that aggression when you are writing?
Danny: Speaking from me personally, it’s just channelled from all the negativity. Music has always been a way to transcribe my feelings and it’s a way to let out the stuff that is maybe not socially acceptable to say 24/7 all the time cause otherwise i’d be put in a mental institution. I never wanted to enter a grindcore band that was political, cause there’s a lot of bands that do it so well. I love the way NAPALM DEATH poetically integrate the political stuff, like politics effects me personally but its more about the emotions and the feelings. It’s a little bit emo to be honest.
Tyler: We’re just an emo band really.
Danny: Emogrind! We just want to bring raw aggression from a very negative place. Watching us it like therapy for us, we just have to lose our minds a little bit.
What’s the over running theme in Methylene Butterfly, your debut record?
Danny: So the album is an entirely true story and it’s about a very dark period of my life when i was in a very destructive relationship, and there was a lot of very bad drugs involved, mostly involving MDMA which is why it’s called Methylene Butterfly. It was a very destructive relationship, I had a lot of depression, there was a lot of self harming involved mostly to each other, so the lyrics were written through a collection of journals I wrote at the time and I kinda created the music to it. It’s weird going back and listening to it now because i’m in a very good headspace, far better than I was then.
Tyler: How are we gonna release the next album?
Danny: Yeah, I’m just too goddamn happy! There’s always some harsh and horrible bits in life, but it was channelling negativity into positivity.
Did you have the album before the first live show?
Danny: Tyler didn’t join until about a year ago.
Tyler: Yeah we didn’t have a band until after they released the album. Then they kidnapped me and forced me to play!
Danny: Funny story about that actually! We saw Tyler’s other band, TUSKAR, in Reading. TUSKAR are an incredible doom band, they’re a two piece and Tyler plays drums and does vocals. We saw them play in Reading and he just hits with such power, and we saw all this groove, I love drummers that groove. There was this one song they played where he started blasting and me and Kyle just looked at each like this was interesting.
Kyle: Found out he was from Guildford and that he practised there. We were like he’s a drummer from Guildford, he needs to play in my band! So we did over pester Tyler, cause we hadn’t met before!
Danny: We had met before.
Tyler: Yeah we had played in other bands and just crossed each other’s path a bit.
How has the dynamic changed now that you don’t have to write the songs by yourself?
Danny: In the best way possible.
Tyler: There are so many different influences in the music we’re writing at the moment, like I’m into slower stuff really but I grew up in hardcore. Now it’s just like can we throw all of these things at a wall and make them stick?
Danny: On the lyrical side, Kyle is way more involved. I took all the lyrical content for the first album, but Kyle contributes some really interesting lyrics and has done vocals before in other projects and I just thought why don’t we divert the aggression onto someone else’s issues? Third album is gonna be all Tyler’s problems.
Tyler: It’s gonna be all happy and pop-punk! I love life! PIZZA!
Danny: It’s just gonna be TORCHE with HM2s.
When can we expect new material from you guys?
Danny: We are currently writing our next album, Hell is Much Better Than This, at the moment and obviously we were planning on having it done this year but Metal 2 The Masses happened and we had to jig stuff around a bit. We have a couple of shows booked at the end of the year, but we’re looking to focus the rest of the year on finishing off the album.
If Methylene Butterfly was about a toxic relationship, what’s the theme behind this new title?
Kyle: Well the title kinda gives it away, Hell is Much Better Than This! There’s a lot of self-deprecation, there’s a lot of ‘I hate myself, but I hate everyone equally’ vibes, so it’s just this barrel of anger. The best way of fighting your demons is by writing about them, and its just gonna be a big release, as angry as we possibly can. All the bad times in our lives we’re just gonna write about them and get angry.
Danny: It’s really interesting because now we have Tyler here, the influences have changed, so originally there was traditional grind, we had a drum machine on the first album and there’s a real industrial vibe to it. Now we have Tyler in, there’s a lot of crossover/hardcore vibe, we’re trying to get all the hardest genres we can find and compact ‘em down into a minute and a half of HM2 noise.
Kyle: Even in the writing process, if a song fits in it then it fits. We’ve all agreed that everything we write needs to be heavier, faster, slower in parts, every album we write we just want to make it better. We’ve written most of the album, there’s just some bits to iron out but if the next album is slow, it doesn’t matter to us because we don’t want to be contained. It’s a natural flowing band that we can let all our angst and anger out!
Methylene Butterfly is out now via Hibernacular Records.
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