INTERVIEW: Spencer Charnas – Ice Nine Kills

Masters of the metalcore concept album, ICE NINE KILLS have turned their hands to a record inspired by timeless horror movies. From A Nightmare On Elm Street to The Crow, each track on their fifth album The Silver Scream pays tribute to a classic slasher and, with a little help from some famous friends, the Boston baddies take on each villain one by one. Frontman and sole surviving original member Spencer Charnas tells Distorted Sound all about his horror movie infatuation, the attention to detail on the record and how the band are ending 2018 in style.

How’s 2018 treated you so far, Spencer?

Spencer: The year’s been great, we just got word that our album did very well in its first week, shattered all the records we’ve held in the past and debuted in the top 30 on the Billboard 200 chart in the US and we’re very excited. The fans seem to have really got behind the record and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. I thought it would get a great reaction from our fans but I didn’t think it would be this powerful, so I’m really excited that everyone is really responding to the album and exceeding my expectations.

You’ve even drawn in horror fans too!

Spencer: I think slowly but surely, people who might not even listen to metal but love horror are coming out of the woodwork and discovering the band. I’m hoping that continues to spread around not just the metal community but the horror world too, I’m very excited to see that start to unfold.

What’s your earliest memory of horror movies?

Spencer: I got into the genre at a very young age. When I was seven or eight, I would go shopping with my mom to the grocery store in my town and I would hang out in this little video store to kill time while she was doing shopping. I would wander around the store and, for whatever reason, I was drawn to the aisle that said horror movies. I’d stare at the cover art of these movies like Friday the 13th, Halloween, Creepshow and Silent Night, Deadly Night and I became infatuated with the genre. My parents were cool enough to let me see those movies even though I was really young and it just built from there – it was that forbidden fruit feeling. I remember I got a report card from my kindergarten teacher which said, “Spencer claims a lot of things including seeing the Texas Chainsaw Massacre” – this is kindergarten!

Who’s your top slasher villain?

Spencer: It’s really hard to nail it down to just one, I cover pretty much all of them on the new album. Michael Myers got me into horror, then obviously Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. Later down the road, Ghostface from Scream was a really big one for me, that movie took the slasher genre cliches, turned them on their heads and made very self-referential jokes while also being very scary and violent, taking the horror seriously. I was happy that we could cover the grandfathers of the genre on the album but also putting out some of the lesser known movies that deserve some more recognition which weren’t mainstream successes like Silent Night, Deadly Night.

How long would you last in a horror movie yourself?

Spencer: I’d definitely be the killer so I’d survive the whole thing!

You could be Michael Myers then, he’s just a normal guy!

Spencer: I think that was so terrifying about Halloween in the first movie, he obviously got a little more supernatural towards the others, but it could really happen – Michael Myers was just a guy with a knife who, for whatever motive, wanted to kill everyone in his wake.

Has this horror album been a long term idea?

Spencer: We did the last album back in 2015 called Every Trick in the Book which was a concept album about literature with every song based on a book, so that was what birthed the idea of an album with this theme. The reaction from our fans was so positive, we thought we’d stumbled upon something a little different to what everyone else was doing. It seemed to me that the next logical step would be a film theme, and not only was I thinking that in my own head, I’d seen numerous people online saying “this album is so cool, next time you guys should do movies because I’d love to see what you do with Jason” so it was a combination of both.

It’s a good thing you started with the books first as today’s youth don’t typically read much.

Spencer: It was definitely the right order to do it in because books are a little more of a foreign idea to kids of the 2018 era. Movies will, for better or for worse, be more mainstream than books. It was a cool way to test it out with the books and then come in with even more of an idea people could latch onto.

How long has this writing process taken?

Spencer: It’s been a year and three months or a little longer since I started writing last summer. I really wanted to include as much detail and little nods to the films as possible, to the point where before we wrote the lyrics out, I’d list all these little things I wanted to include in the song, whether it was a reference to a character or a turn of phrase that was a nod to how someone was killed in the original. It’s so exciting for me to see people discovering all these little things and really appreciating the attention to detail in this album. Not only did I want to get some of the dialogue from the films, I did some of my own versions of them and rewrote the dialogue, but also little homages to the scores are thrown in all over the place.

You’ve planted Easter eggs everywhere!

Spencer: With this album, it’s a testament to having fun. When we wanted the ‘chi-chi-chi ha-ha-ha’ section in Thank God It’s Friday, I wanted to scream it and it was definitely a risk because this idea could’ve fallen on its face and seem forced. I’m glad to see we took a risk and it’s only been out for a week but it seems it’s really worked for the majority of people.

This is a real labour of love for you, then?

Spencer: I’ve always been a huge fan of whatever I’m a fan of, it’s not just a casual thing for me. If I love something, I love it whole-heartedly and I’m obsessed with it, whether it be a movie or a band. I’ll find all the costumes and I’ll search for little-known trivia about them – I think that’s why our entire project reflects this attention to detail because I’m a fan and I know what I’d want from a band or a movie.

You’ve even purposefully written thirteen tracks!

Spencer: Of course, if you’re doing a horror album, it’s either got to be 13 tracks, 31 or 666  and the latter two numbers would be a little too long…

How did Sam Kubrick’s guest spot on Enjoy Your Slay go down?

Spencer: Our first time overseas, I was appointed with the job of figuring out our opening act, so our booking agency provided a list of bands that were submitting to tour with us, and one of those was a band called SHIELDS. We became friendly with them and then eventually realised that their vocalist was Stanley Kubrick’s grandson! He invited us over to stay at the Kubrick estate when we had an off-day in London and we stayed in the room where Stanley would edit all his films. It was amazing seeing memorabilia from Stanley’s unbelievable career, the award he got for 2001: A Space Odyssey, all the masks from Eyes Wide Shut, the original audio reels of Full Metal Jacket. As someone who’s a fan of Kubrick’s work, I couldn’t believe it. So we became very friendly with Sam and then we did a song about The Shining and I thought to myself, how could we not ask Sam to be a part of this? We love his voice, plus the legacy connection to that film was unbelievable and that added a sort of depth to that guest feature. I wrote the lyrics with a nod toward someone from the Kubrick bloodline who was on the track, he sings a line that says “come rain or shine, I’ll hit your whole bloodline” and we had a lot of fun with it!

How did you manage to embody all these horror icons for each track?

Spencer: That was one of the most fun and challenging parts of the record, I wanted to have these characters really have their own voice, I didn’t want to double up on anything and have a sound too similar so I really spent time trying to get a unique voice for everyone. What was challenging at times was that characters like Freddy Krueger speak in their films so it was easy to deliver lines like him, but people like Michael Myers never utter a word throughout the entire franchise, so that was an interesting experience to voice Michael Myers singing or screaming.

Did you go full fanboy in the process?

Spencer: You’ve got to remember that there’s an element of campiness to the horror genre and while the deaths are horrifically violent, there’s definitely an aspect of comedy in there and we tried to make that shine through in our work, especially with films like Silent Night, Deadly Night on our song Merry Axemas – that’s a sleazy and violent yet really funny film that caused quite a stir when it was released back in 1984 and we love it, we wanted that energy to come through the speakers.

Has the whole team been behind you?

Spencer: I have to give credit to our management team and our record label, Outerloop and Fearless Records, this whole thing was a risky thing and I’m glad I was able to convince them to get behind this wacky idea and they embraced it. Whether they knew it was going to be a success or not, they took a leap of faith with me and I appreciate. We had an enormous amount of support for this album from some of my favourite bands growing up that got me into playing music, everyone from LESS THAN JAKE to MEST, FENIX TX and FINCH, we’ve had a lot of cameos throughout the record from people I’ve idolised over the years. When we were writing It Is the End, I was thinking to myself that I was hearing horns in my head, not devil horns, but a horn section. I thought it would be cool if we could get LESS THAN JAKE to do it but it seemed like a wacky idea but here we are!

Do you collect any horror movie memorabilia?

Spencer: I’m very much into collecting. I have a Ghostface mask signed by Wes Craven and that’s one of my prized possessions. We’re playing an acoustic set at the house from the final scene of Scream at the end of the month and my friend Nate who’s organising it gave me the lamp from Scream 4 when the girl gets brutally murdered by Ghostface as he steps out of the closet.

After that, ICE NINE KILLS have the huge ATREYU tour this year. Has that sunk in yet?

Spencer: I’m really excited about it, for me it’s an opportunity to tour with a band that was a big influence on my music right out of high school. During the last few years of high school, I really started to get into heavy music that screamed at me with harsh-sounding vocals and ATREYU were one of the first bands I loved out of that world. Being in a position where a band like that is recognising us and wanting us to be associated with them is an honour. They’re a very important piece of our genre and it’s very exciting to be able to cross this off the bucket list.

ICE NINE KILLS have toured with some iconic bands over the years, who have you loved touring with the most?

Spencer: MOTIONLESS IN WHITE are a really fun group of guys to tour with, they’re a band that really believed in us when other bands wouldn’t take us out so I can’t thank those guys enough. We have so many good friends that it’s hard to name all of them – CHELSEA GRIN, LIKE MOTHS TO FLAMES, I SEE STARS and ATTILA. There’s so many great bands that have been gracious enough over the years to expose us to their following, that’s the kind of scene I was raised in.

That’s testament to the effect you have on the scene around you.

Spencer: It’s very flattering also that our dedicated followers are getting not only tattoos of our logo and our lyrics, but also of my signature – that’s a pretty bold move and it’s humbling to see someone be that affected by something I’ve done to want to commemorate that on their body.

The Silver Scream is out now via Fearless Records.

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