INTERVIEW: Nick Ruskell – Witchsorrow
You’re unlikely to come across another mind who can jump from talking about PALLBEARER to BLINK-182 as cohesively as can Nick “Necroskull” Ruskell. The WITCHSORROW frontman has nearly lived his whole life within the doom genre and puts rest to any arguments that a steady life-long diet of the bleak soundscapes of SAINT VITUS and CANDLEMASS will have an adverse effect on your well-being. Necroskull, or Nick as he prefers in conversation, is less the kind of guy you’d find hammering through a lumbering cut off God Curse Us as he is just a really pleasant dude to talk to. And that we did… for just shy of an hour, going from WITCHSORROW‘s forthcoming record Hexenhammer to the “Post-SABBATH” world it’s born into as well as rock music’s steady shift north on the extreme spectrum. So put your doom skulls on and get stuck in.
So Hexenhammer is due out in just over a week. With everything that goes into the writing and recording of an album, how does it feel to be finally releasing it and sharing it with everyone?
Nick: Unbelievably awesome. It’s been a long road. Making a record is something that takes a year. It’s just one of those things and when we do it, I get very obsessed with the whole thing and it does my head in a bit because I focus entirely on that and can’t be distracted away from it. It takes over my entire mind. That’s not so much for Emily [Witch, Bass] and Dave [Wilbrahammer, Drums] which can sometimes make them think that I’m being a bit of a dick about things.
We recorded it in August last year and then you have to do so much other stuff. You have to do artwork and photographs and get it all pressed and do label things and schedule it. That bit is weird because you go into this void which I find quite depressing where you’ve finished the record but you can’t do anything because the it’s nowhere near out. So to actually have it out, it sounds melodramatic to say my life has meaning again. You’re back in the game again, you don’t have to sit on your hands and wait for the record to come out. It feels really good and so far I’ve not heard to many reactions yet because most of the reviews aren’t out but what we have heard has been overwhelming. One of the things when you’re in that frame of mind waiting for something is that you start doubting it heavily and it becomes a different weight on your mind and you start worrying that it’s shit and you start over-analysing what you could’ve done. So to actually start hearing some feedback has been really positive. It puts your mind at ease as well. I’m looking forward to it coming out next week and we’ve got a little tour coming up so it’s all good.
I’ve seen a few of the reviews come in and one in particular called it the best metal album of the year which are obviously really big words…
Nick: That actually was the first review I read. I got sent the link and when I see stuff like that I tend to be like a guy from a bomb squad cutting the blue wire really carefully. I was bowled over by that. I completely dispute the line in question but it’s overwhelming that someone would say that. That’s been tremendous and now that some of our friends are starting to hear it, and people in other bands have been really buzzing on it, it’s really cool. We are people who can have a tendency to worry and be negative about things. And as we operate as a bubble with the three of us, there’s kind of an echo chamber when it comes to certain things and when you add doubt in there, that sort of amplifies it because you’re not really talking to anyone else. There’s no one else’s input to say “You’re being silly”. It’s nice after having done it to think that other people are gonna hear it and that they might like it!
Prior to this, No Light, Only Fire and God Curse Us obviously came from a really dark place. What is the story with this new album? What is Hexenhammer trying to say and is there any relation to today’s political and social climate?
Nick: Those two albums were written during a really quite unpleasant time for me personally. WITCHSORROW was a distraction from something that I really couldn’t get away from. It really crushed me and when I look at some of the lyrics and remember what it was like writing those songs and what I wanted to put across, it was very bleak and dark and quite angry. It was almost directionless, impotent frustration with the situation I was in and certain people who I couldn’t escape from. It weighed pretty badly on me and with this album, this problem started to fade. While we were making it something changed in my life. Something happened and something left. It was like turning on a light switch and there was suddenly an absence of this terrible, dark person. There were bits of darkness that was feeding into half of it and halfway through recording I got this great news so we had to change some of the lyrics to reflect the heroes in a couple of the songs to actually have this happy ending.
My worldview flickers between being quite mellow and hippy-ish and “What more do I need, the suns out and I’ve got a cold beer” or being completely consumed with the worry that gets fed to you by your phone or your TV or whatever. I can get really down about politics and Donald Trump and global warming and plastic in the ocean and meat and stuff like that. That’s all stuff that disappoints me because they’re unsolvable problems and that’s the source of the frustration. The thing throughout all the records and all of my lyrics really is that there’s been a tendency towards annihilation, or at least there’s an underlining theme that’s been quite happy to see everyone either wiped out in a big ball of fire or just blinked out of existence. And that’s something that’s fed to us. There’s never any good news anymore. Even as a distraction, everything is just kind of shit and everything is being held up on very fragile, creaky legs. I do worry about where we are going to go because the world that we know is unsustainable. That’s something that worries me.
Also on this album, there’s a lot metaphors. Sometimes within a song there’ll be a line or two that came out because they sounded like a good boneheaded heavy metal lyric which is something that I’m more than happy to have because why not? We’re a heavy metal band and we’re boneheads. But there’s other stuff that’s sort of wrapped up in metaphor. I’ve never directly addressed specific things that you can refer back to but there’s always metaphor. For example in the title track Hexenhammer, on the surface that’s a song about The Hexenhammer, the treaties on heresy, witchcraft and sorcery. It’s basically a guidebook from the middle ages about how to kill witches. That’s just doom but on the subject of that, as soon as you start thinking about that, you go to all other sorts of things like witch-hunts and abuses of power and questioning what authorities people have over you and how they got it and you striking back in a fantastically heavy metal way. There’s all sorts of things. Some of it is a bit of nonsense, some of it is a bit of wider world-view, some of it is a bit more personal. Generally, when I write lyrics, it’ll be whatever’s rattling around my head at the time. I get to a point where I need to write lyrics. I’m not really someone who sits and writes poetry or anything like that. I’ve quite a functional, utilitarian approach to when I need to write. So when it comes to lyrics, I need to have something going around in my head first and quite often that’s some degree of anger and frustration. There’s been other times when it’s been more thoughtful. The global, political situation ever since I was a kid has always been quite a big knot to untangle.
To go back to your original question in a very roundabout way, this album continues the lineage of the last two. God Curse Us was about this horrible, fiery apocalypse and almost daring it to come and actually happen. No Light, Only Fire was like the idea that something terrible did happen and nothing’s changed. This time it’s like wondering what the hell to do. Maybe all the wrongs of the world are too big to take care of now and there’s nothing that can change it. It’s like a mosquito biting an elephant to try and change it I guess.
Would it be right to say Hexenhammer is in equal part influenced by personal issues and wider issues?
Nick: I think there’s more personal stuff on there but the thing is, I think the anger on the album is kind of like a blunderbuss. It’s not this focused thing. To use a very clumsy metaphor, if you have a dustbin that you’re throwing shit in all day and then you tip it out in one direction, that’s me writing lyrics. That’s everything charging up this bad mood and then just flinging it out. It’s not too specific. I think quite a lot of it is personal. I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind or tell anyone what to think or anything like that, it’s just me having an opportunity in lyrics to shout and moan and have a bratty meltdown if you like. It’s a shout at the world in a very unreasonable way without it really having to mean anything. If I expressed the things in the lyrics in my day-to-day life, like if I went to work and told people that I was going to hang them or whatever, I would get into all sorts of difficulties. I’d be up before a human resources person and I’d probably get punched. You can’t shout these things in the pub… unless you’re onstage playing in the pub. It’s just sort of a dumping ground for negativity I guess. And for me to, in a very selfish way, sort of piss and moan about anything that I want without anyone telling me that I’m being mean. Because then I can spend the rest of the time being nice!
So is it quite a cathartic process being able to put all this stuff in one place?
Nick: Oh absolutely, yeah. When I write these things, I don’t look at the sheet of lyrics and go “Ahh”. Once it’s all bedded in and you start playing those songs live, they kind of play themselves almost. You know exactly what fits where. That’s when suddenly you get this feeling of catharsis. With a lot of musicians or sports people, when you’re playing, the bit of your mind that deals with thinking about stress and money and work, arguing with your neighbour or whatever tax thing you’ve got to fill in, all the boring shit switches off. For the hour or whatever that you’re playing, you’re somewhere else because the formula part of your brain is off. It’s kind of working out all the knots in your head without having to be there because you’re so focused on this one thing. You’re so carried away by the music that when you finish you think “Fuck me that went quite quickly”, but you feel really good because you’ve got something out. Sometimes it’s just needing to shout and scream but there’s other times where you just need to switch off your mind for a bit. I think that’s really good because when you’re playing, no-one can come and ask you to do something. Your phones in your bag in the dressing room. There’s no distraction. It’s actually almost calming and zen in some way because you’re thinking brain doesn’t have to do anything. All you’re doing is playing music. When you’re playing a gig, you already know those songs so well that you don’t have to think about them. You start it and before you know it you’re at the end and something happened in the middle and loads of noise came out!
It’s good to have an outlet like that. It’s nice. I think there is increasingly, with the way people occupy their brains with having everything at their fingertips all the time, there’s not a lot of chance to actually switch off properly like that. You’re just constantly having crap fed into your brain all the time through Facebook and Twitter and texting people all the time about nothing and sharing memes and things. There’s always this feeling that you can be got at any time in the day or the night. There’s always going to be a message waiting for you, there’s always going to be something for you to look at. So just to have a vehicle to be able to switch off your brain and shut out the world for a little while is quite nice. I think it’s important to do that because otherwise it drives you absolutely nuts. There’s all these studies being done in rising mental health problems in young people and I do think not doing nothing is quite a big thing. Just having that time, whether you’re playing music or playing golf, just concentrating on something mundane where you can drift off isn’t valued anywhere near enough. I think if more people did them people would be far more happier and hopefully there would be fewer people running into problems like depression and anxiety.
I’ve had Hexenhammer for a few days now and it absolutely clicks with me later at night. As a doom expert yourself, do you find there’s any particular way you like to listen to these albums? Or are you a guy that just puts CANDLEMASS on first thing in the morning?
Nicl: [laughs] Quite often I do listen to quite heavy music first thing in the morning because I get on the train and I got to work and I’ve got headphones in. Quite often I’ll have CANDLEMASS or WIZARD (not to be confused with WIZZARD) or some horrible, gnarly death metal on. I always find that darkness and night-time are quite important to a lot of doom and metal music in general. I don’t necessarily think it’s because it’s dark. There’s a certain amount of solitude that you get in doom, pun intended, that only really comes at night. I come home quite late quite often and I’ll be walking down my street at one or two in the morning on my own and there’s an effect that you get from it that elicits something in the music and something in you. I think that’s one very ideal way of listening to it. On the other hand, I think one of the things that I like best about playing in a metal band is that irresponsible, stupid, beer-y, with-your-mates-in-the-pub vibe as well. Coming back to CANDLEMASS, I can remember watching them at Desertfest last year and the vibe was just pure joy. People were all smiling there heads off and having a really good time, arms round each other and singing along, all that type of stuff. Whatever works for you. There’s some records that I can put on in the day, in the height of summer that would just drive someone insane. No-one wants to listen to this on a summer-y day, but if you go to a metal festival like a METAL metal festival, it’s all bands like that in the day. If you go to Obscene Extreme or something like that, it’s all stupidly heavy bands on a really nice day. I can remember at Wacken a few years ago, seeing bands like MARDUK, DARK FUNERAL and CARPATHIAN FOREST and people like that in blazing afternoon sunshine. You’d see MAYHEM with pigs heads on sticks at four in the afternoon in almost 40 degree heat. I definitely think that darkness is a good one but music works its way into you in the strangest of environments.
Coming back to Hexenhammer, obviously there’s a great deal of BLACK SABBATH worship in doom generally. When approaching writing a new WITCHSORROW album do you try to embrace all the tropes of doom? Do you try to avoid it? Or is it just a case of seeing where the song goes?
Nick: Oh absolutely embrace them. That’s my starting point. That’s my bread and butter. We try other things and we do experiment with these things but the whole reason I’m in a band like this playing this kind of music is that the influence almost stops after the first three BLACK SABBATH albums in some respects. When we write I tend to play guitar a lot on my own and try and come up with riffs and ideas and if I can get a few bits to work together then that’s great. But that’s not so common because whenever we get together, stuff changes. I do tend to write a lot on my own and quite often I’ll be thinking about Tony Iommi or Leif Edling from CANDLEMASS. My mind just tries to tap into that kind of feeling and it can take hours and hours and hours of playing and just coming up with nothing or something that you think is shit and then all of a sudden something works. I often think of Tony Iommi when BLACK SABBATH were making Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, being on his own in the crypt of that haunted castle just riffing and suddenly striking inspiration. For me I’ve just got this picture of that in my mind whenever I start writing. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m absolutely obsessed with BLACK SABBATH, Emily is as well, we’ve seen them umpteen times and we’re completely obsessed with them. To me, BLACK SABBATH are the most important. There isn’t anything in metal without them. It’s almost like saying you’re a fan of breathing. It doesn’t matter if you like it or not, you just do this thing. You convert your food into muscle energy. It’s just one of those things that there’s no getting away from. We just zone in on it so much that there is really no way of getting away from it.
We do try other things. Sometimes when we hit a wall with our writing, especially among the three of us, we’ll reach a point in the song where we think “Well what do we do now?”. Then we’ll just do something stupid and everyone picks it up and runs with it. On the album, the song Like Sisyphus is quite an unusual song for us. I had this riff sitting around for years, this black metal thing that I got when horsing around on an acoustic guitar a few years ago. I was doing an impression of DEATHSPELL OMEGA, the French black metal band, just doing this discordant thing that actually started as the end part of a song but as we tore bits away from it, it ended becoming the main motif of that song. I listen to that song now and I think it’s a very unusual one for us but some people are saying it’s their favourite song off the record. I think it’s quite unusual because it’s so not what we’d usually do, it’s so out of our comfort zone. It’s the first time we’ve done something like that. We haven’t had time to sit there and plan it down and hone our craft by writing loads of songs like that. But then again, BLACK SABBATH did loads of stuff that didn’t sound normally like BLACK SABBATH, some of it was terrible, but there were some real gems in there as well.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a doom band using blastbeats…
Nick: Yeah Like Sisyphus is the one with the blastbeat. I spent a lot of time insisting on that! What happened was a classic example of us hitting the wall and going “What can we do?”. I went home from rehearsals and I just thought “Blastbeat”. I’ve been obsessed with doing a blastbeat for ages and we had to figure out a way of doing one. We can’t just come out swinging like BEHEMOTH, it has to be a doom blastbeat and I could never quite explain to Dave and Emily what that meant. The closest I ever got was PRIMORDIAL where it still has that brooding menace about it. It took Dave ages because it was initially in a different time signature. Someone has since told me it’s almost impossible to blast in. I was trying to make Dave do that and he was getting very angry with me. When he was recording part of the drums, that was one of the things where he was like “I want to get this really spot on” and I walked into the room and the look he gave me could’ve melted the Antarctic. The genius of Chris Fielding (producer) was he clicked his fingers, worked some studio magic and went “Why don’t you just do it in a completely different time signature that Dave can actually do the blast in and get it done in 10 minutes?” I dug my heels in said “No, no, no” but he did it and it sounds brilliant. Dave‘s actually a really good death metal drummer. Before he was in WITCHSORROW he was in a death metal band and he’s an incredible drummer. As soon as he got into a style of blastbeat that he was familiar with, he just rolled downhill with it. Emily was a bit unsure about the blastbeat as well. I’ve played in some grind bands before and I’ve dicked around playing that sort of music but she’s never even played along to a MORBID ANGEL record. She was like “What the fuck do I do? How fast am I supposed to strum?” So there was a little learning on that but I think it came out cool. It’s one little nugget of a fresh, weird idea on the end of the album to send people off with.
Yeah, that totally took me off-guard…
Nick: [laughs] Cool, yeah that’s kind of what I’m hoping for. We’ve played very, very slow for a long time. We’ve played these JUDAS PRIEST speeds for a long time, so to have that blastbeat on there was like the final frontier really.
We were talking earlier about the influence of the first three BLACK SABBATH albums in particular. Hexenhammer is a doom album that’s now born into a “post Sabbath” world. What is it do you think that keeps bringing people like you and me into this genre that’s now nearly 50 years old?
Nick: If I knew that I would be a billionaire. I’d be able to figure out how to market the hell out of it. I don’t know. I think there’s something about that speed and those riffs and the scales everyone uses to write their riffs that hooks people in. I think the atmosphere of it as well is something that never really gets old. The notion of “balls-out rock music” is one that doesn’t get old because it’s so effective. It’s like, why is it that Coca Cola is more or less the same as it was in the 1950s? It’s because people like it. People like what this simple thing is. I think that speaks for music as well.
The other thing is there is a degree of catharsis in darkness and escapism. I think it speaks to people on a level where you’re getting in touch with the honest part of your emotional spectrum. People aren’t happy all the time. They’re not always in love, they’re not always shouting from the rooftops about how great everything is. And so I think that dark mood, even if you’re not completely at the end of your tether, everyone has those moments where you just feel really quite bleak. That’s something that lives in the music and the way it works its way into you, it charms its way into your head. I think it also represents something that’s quite real. It’s not made of plastic. It’s not all made up on a computer. It’s people working with their hands. It’s drummers hitting really, really hard. In the 70s people had to play the fuck out of their instruments because there was no other way to get it across. You couldn’t boost things very much and you couldn’t trigger things. When you listen to people like BLACK SABBATH, first of all Bill Ward is a fantastic drummer, but you can also hear how hard he’s smashing that kit. You can hear the physical strain on all the instruments that you don’t get if you’re really trying to get everything spot on. If you listen to Tony Iommi, you can hear that he is just playing the hell out of his guitar. It’s the same with a lot of people from those days like Ritchie Blackmore or Jimi Hendrix.
With Hendrix, I can remember being a kid and seeing a video of him at Woodstock when I was like 10 and seeing the things he was doing with the guitar… I didn’t think you were allowed to do things like that to a guitar. I didn’t realise that grown-ups actually did throw their guitars around like that and really hammer on them and stretch the strings all across the neck and make a noise with it. That really spoke to me and it actually really held me back in my musical development because I started playing guitar with that in mind. When I came to a point where I was a bit older and had a guitar teacher who would’ve been able to teach me more advanced shredding and things, I was so set in my mind that all I wanted to do was bend the neck of my guitar when I was playing and really pull on it. I think that’s cool and that still comes through in people like Matt Pike from HIGH ON FIRE. He’s totally got that same vibe and there’s still that connection. It’s not that it’s a retro sound. It’s the people really physically doing stuff with their hands and really feeling that and feeling that people are really working hard to get something out of a song. I guess that’s what keeps drawing people back to rock music. It’s that physical real-ness and raw emotion and sweat that comes through with it.
As well as being born into a “post-SABBATH” world, there also seems to be a lot more experimentation in doom now with BELL WITCH going in a super expansive direction, TWITCHING TONGUES fusing it with hardcore and now you with WITCHSORROW adding a lot more traditional heavy metal and even blastbeats on Hexenhammer. Another big question that you’ll probably hate; with this is mind, where do you think the collective world of doom is headed?
Nick: I’ve been a doom maniac for twenty-odd years, since I was at school. It feels totally different on one level because bands have split up and moved on. But on the other hand, at that time there were a lot of traditional doom bands like CATHEDRAL, ELECTRIC WIZARD, SOLSITCE and COUNT RAVEN. In those days, that was when SAINT VITUS and PENTAGRAM were lost to the ages. This is in the late 90s when that stuff hadn’t been given a new lease of life by the internet. At that time it was also the start of bands like ISIS and NEUROSIS and that quite experimental, slow, heavy music. Today, even though a lot of the bands have changed and split up, there’s still a similar sort of thing going on. You have the trad doom bands who are still doing their thing. There’s new trad doom bands coming along and keeping that thing alive and then you’ve got other bands, like you said TWITCHING TONGUES and stuff like that that’s doing something different.
I think where doom is going, there’s always going to be bands like us who are just happy to stand there and play stolen BLACK SABBATH and PENTAGRAM riffs and have quite an old fashioned heavy metal vibe about it, but then there’s other people who don’t find interest in that. Their interest is in building huge walls of sound with loads of pedals and really being quite muso about it. And that’s great, I think it all feeds back into one another. It just comes and goes in waves really. For quite a while, the old fashioned doom stuff was not really in style. There were a lot more of bands like ISIS and stuff like that and every now and then it just flips over and the more old fashioned stuff comes back into fashion and the other stuff starts to sound a bit dated. That’s when another load of new bands come through and totally blow your mind.
The really big stuff in doom that I can see people getting really excited about are YOB and PALLBEARER who are in between the two. It’s kind of traditional and then you listen to PALLBEARER and there’s some stuff that sounds like WARNING, but they’ve also got a load of progg-y things and all these other elements that you wouldn’t have heard SAINT VITUS doing. It’s pretty exciting times. At the moment especially I think there’s a lot of stuff coming out that people are genuinely pumped about. The new YOB album is out soon, the newest ELECTRIC WIZARD album is wicked. The fact that quite a lot of people didn’t like it just shows how many people have them on their radar now which is fucking brilliant because I can remember a time when you could go see ELECTRIC WIZARD and there would be 50 people there. They weren’t a giant band and a lot of people thought they were just losers. It took a while for the wider world to catch on but now it’s fucking great that they can sell out places like The Roundhouse. That’s mindblowing.
That PALLBEARER album is a wicked shout for that sort of stuff…
Nick: Yeah it’s fantastic. Before Heartless I thought they were pretty good. I remember seeing them a couple times and seeing people go absolutely spare for them and I sort of felt like I was missing whatever they were getting. I felt I was sort of on the outside looking in on something that I didn’t quite understand. When I got Heartless, everything seemed to fit into place.
I see your piece on ISHAHN in Kerrang! a few weeks back and as someone who can see these things from a different perspective, what do you make of the general shift towards more extreme music? A few years ago I would never have imagined I would see a member of EMPEROR featured prominently in Kerrang! let alone having bands like CODE ORANGE and TURNSTILE on the cover…
Nick: The heavier stuff is what’s exciting people. I think people have spent quite a long time looking for the next big rock band and I think people just got bored of waiting for it. Suddenly all these bands happen to put their heads over the wall all at the same time, like CODE ORANGE, TURNSTILE, CONJURER, EMPLOYED TO SERVE and MØL who everyone’s going on about at the moment. I think truthfully a lot of people have just given up on trying to find a commercially successful rock or metal or punk band when there just isn’t one at the moment. I’m no spring chicken, I’ve seen this stuff for almost twenty years. It comes and goes in waves and there’s no control over it. It comes out of the weirdest places sometimes with no way of predicting it a year ahead. Who would’ve thought a band as initially terrible as BLINK 182 would become one of the biggest bands in America? Their first record is almost un-listenable. Eventually the wind might come and push some bands over there but while we wait for that everyone’s like “Hang on, there’s shitloads of killer bands who’ve all just happened to make records all in the last 18 months that are fucking great”. What is going to hopefully do well for rock music is that type of thinking.
Whenever there was a movement and there were big bands, it wasn’t bands who were necessarily ambitious who tried to get on the radio and on the gravy train, it was stuff that just occurred naturally. If you think about grunge, that shouldn’t have happened. If you think about GREEN DAY, that was not the normal thing. These bands just got big because they were good and then things exploded because they got the right wind behind them with labels and stuff. They weren’t grown in a lab. There isn’t some magical marketing thing to get rock bands really big. If there was, it would be amazing.
This is going to sound weird from someone who plays in a purposefully reductive doom band but I think there’s been quite a lot of tail-chasing. I’m not really a big fan of that real rock style. That post-NICKELBACK car-park rock. You can imagine having a barbecue on the tailgate of your truck. I won’t say any band names because I don’t wanna be mean, I’m just not a big fan of that sort of [adopts american accent] “ROCK”. I think it sucks. It’s horrible. It’s like watching a museum piece or seeing someone do a battle re-enactment or something. It’s fine but it doesn’t feel real. I don’t believe any of those bands are doing it for anything other than the fact that it’s a market with some money in it. People want rock music that sounds like rock whereas I think the cool bands are much better. Bands like TURNSTILE and EMPLOYED TO SERVE, I think they’re fucking great and they’re the ones that are actually gonna go far. If not for them, then hopefully the next bunch of bands who come through and were inspired by them will actually do something wicked from the seeds planted by those first bands. But again, you can’t predict these things, just look at MASTODON. Emily saw them in a pub in Nottingham supporting HIGH ON FIRE and she said they were great. And you kind of expected to see them in pubs for the next five years before they gave up and got jobs in petrol stations but somehow the weirdos triumphed! That’s always a happy ending I suppose. Hopefully in the next few years we’ll some bands really breaking through and actually making a difference.
I think you’re definitely right in saying it does feel like everyone’s stopped looking just as the really awesome bands are coming through…
Nick: You see it so often that the weirdest stuff becomes this huge phenomenon and there’s no trick to it other than being in the right place at the right time and having an enormous deal of luck and having the wind blow in the right direction on the day Johnny Record Company saw you. That’s really all it is. You can have hundreds of bands who shouldn’t have become massive. Like MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE. They’re just a bunch of punk wasters from New Jersey, how did that happen? There’s just some magnetism there I suppose.
We’ve talked a lot about the loftier topics, I just wanted to close up by asking where you think Hexenhammer now sits in the WITCHSORROW discography.
Nick: I’m really, really proud of it. I mentioned earlier how you can have a lot of doubt when you’ve finished a record. Now I feel that I’m actually able to get on with doing the fun things that come with being in a band like gigs and cool stuff. I think we’ve done the best we can and I’m really proud of it and I’m really proud of Emily and Dave for everything they contributed and did for it as well because it’s really wicked to think that me, my wife and my best mate have done something that we can listen to and think “Oh, I actually really like what we’ve done”. I feel a nice warm glow inside. Just yesterday we got the record back to take on tour with us to sell and that was a really cool moment because when you see the artwork for the first time on a vinyl, it feels like a real thing now. You get to see all the stuff you’ve done, all the pictures that you’ve laid out nice. I feel really, really proud of it. We’ve been rehearsing the songs ready for the tour and I feel that they’re the best we could’ve done. They’re some of the best songs we’ve ever written. I certainly think Demons Of The Mind is one of my favourite songs that we have now and I feel really good about playing it. It’s interesting to see all the things we had to go through to get here, all the disagreements, trying to write and all the rest of it. It just feels really good and I’m very proud of the three of us. We’ve done it again. We’ve managed to actually get another record made, and not only that but we actually like it and the end of it! We can pat ourselves on the back a bit.
After revisiting all the other records in preparation for this, I must admit I think this one is my personal favourite. I really like the pace that’s seeped into the music as time has gone on. I think that’s really awesome.
Nick: Well someone said to us the other day that it’s become sort of a trademark that we have this speed but it’s still total doom and that there’s this heavy metal pace to it. I thought that was quite cool to hear because that’s sort of an unspoken thing that we’ve been aiming for. We were actually booked for a doom all-dayer thing and the promoter got in touch and said “Hey do you guys wanna come and play it? I’ve got loads of sludge bands and experimental drone stuff but I need to have a trad doom band and you’re the first ones I thought of”. I thought that was really cool. Since we started all I ever wanted to be was to be thought of like bands like REVEREND BIZARRE and ELECTRIC WIZARD. To actually be the band people get in touch with when they want that style of doom is quite a nice little thing.
Hexenhammer is set for release on May 25th via Candlelight Records.
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