Red Method: Everything In The Extreme

RED METHOD are putting the extreme in metal. Not in terms of becoming extreme metal genre kings, for RED METHOD lie decidedly more in the industrial-cum-groove-cum-nu-metal genre bracket, but rather in terms of… everything else. “If you’re extreme, you’re extreme. Your behaviours are extreme. Your lifestyle is extreme. You live in it and breathe in it,” says vocalist J S.A.N.G.R.E. Possibly one of the only things that has mellowed out is the frontman’s stage name. “When I started playing back in the day, I had the most ridiculous name,” J says. “I thought, how can I complicate things for magazines and press as much as possible? Solomon Jay Lucifer Christ.”

The London sextet released their latest EP, Vol 1: As In Life, in July, and one of the tracks, Detonate, recently blasted songs from the likes of MASTODON, LOATHE, IN THIS MOMENT and BURY TOMORROW off the chart to be named one of Metal Hammer’s 12 Best New Metal Songs You Need To Hear Right Now. They guest headlined the final of Metal 2 The Masses Kent in June, with their riotous performance leaving “no survivors”. And a millipede shat on J’s face in the Detonate music video. All of this to say, RED METHOD are nothing if not desirable, unpredictable and full of extreme chaos. “Our shows have always been extreme, but lately we’ve been pushing it to the next notch of madness. Stage diving, jumping around the corners of the bar and climbing up the side of the PA…anything can happen.”

“And in the last few years, we’ve had this really gnarly, twisted and messed up vibe. It’s this kind of full performance that the band delivers; we’re not just standing there, playing our guitars like twits,” J says. One of the keys to the gnarliness was deciding it would be a fantastic idea to cover themselves in black paint to perform in. “We love when we do it, but then we always have that pause before we put it on where we’re like, ‘Shit, here we go again’. It’s just like a wet, dirty shower, and you can feel it in every single crack of your body,” J grimaces. “I’ve also been stopped about five times in the last three years by the police because I look like I’m drenched in blood.” If anyone wants to create some after-show merch for RED METHOD that says “don’t worry, I’m in a metal band”, they’d be extremely grateful.

“Everything I do is extreme. Even in my day job, I work with very violent children. So it’s a lot of intense behaviour every day, and you gotta support them and make sure they’re not excluded,” J says. The vocalist also trains in MMA, Krav Maga, and paints dementedly good paintings of the devil and Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. “I think I get bored very quickly, you know? But don’t get me wrong, I need my calm days. I need days where I literally don’t do anything for a whole day and just sit down and watch, um, serial killer documentaries. Does that count?”

Being drawn to intensity and extremeness in life is one of the things that got J into heavy music in the first place. “Bands that were actually living and breathing it every day, who were the embodiment of what they said and did. Like back in the day, SEPULTURA used to rehearse in a chicken shed and travel in the back of a van full of rats and goats,” J says. “It’s one thing I am definitely proud of and that I can take to my grave: although we’re not signed to a major record label, we’re not rich kids paying to play at the very top of Download. Because in this day and age, sadly, it’s a lot of who you know or what you pay, but we’re not like that. We’ve earned every single thing that we’ve done. What we talk about is real. The mental health, the addictions, the fighting demons, the grief, the losses and everything that we put across in the music, is real.”

Even RED METHOD’s approach to recording ventures into extreme territory. “I wanna die when I’m recording,” J says. “I wanna be suffering in that room. And as the lyrics are spat out, I wanna represent what it’s causing. We basically track until I can’t continue. It’s very similar to the KORN, to the SLIPKNOT kind of recordings they used to do back in the day. To recreate that hype, fierceness, struggle and primitive vibes, you gotta do it that way.” Vol 1: As In Life is about taking the listener through the different stages of hell, through the horrors of misanthropy, solipsism, angst, grief, disaffection, psychosis, and rejection – and you can hear it. “We’ve pretty much hit every single roadblock as a band or as living individuals, and it’s been hard,” J says.

As the “Vol 1″ in the title suggests, RED METHOD’s latest EP barely scratches the surface of how dark and deep it’s going to get. Although songs like Detonate get very close. “It’s a heavy one, that one. It’s literally imploding,” J says. “From May last year all the way till three months ago, I was going from surgery to recovery to surgery to doing one show and doing whatever I could to get through the performance…I had seven surgeries in a year, and I just couldn’t cope with it anymore. I couldn’t do anything by myself, and nobody was helping. And literally, I just wanted to detonate. I wanted to end it all. I managed to survive the whole year like that, but it’s been…a hell of a ride.”

Vol 1: As In Life is out now via self-release. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS132 here.