Warbringer: Knowledge Is Pain
Californian thrash metal outfit WARBRINGER made an immediate impact on the scene during their arrival alongside the ‘new wave’ in the early 00s. Since this time they have progressed into one of the most consistent pillars of the genre, with their more recent albums Woe To The Vanquished and Weapons Of Tomorrow providing some of their best material to date. The highly anticipated follow-up Wrath And Ruin is on the horizon and frontman John Kevill continues to fire on all cylinders.
“Some of the themes involved are class, power, technofeudalism, socioeconomics and modern dystopia. We’re looking for a title and we need to use the letter W which is just a thing that we’ve embraced over the years. I came across the word wrath and what came to mind was Théoden‘s battle cry from Return Of The King, ‘Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!’ and that’s where the title was born. It fit in very well with the cover art where it’s like an ivory tower above the clouds and the lords rain down wrath and ruin upon those below them to keep them destitute and miserable. It sounded quite cruel and cold from a word perspective.”
WARBRINGER have tackled a variety of topics in their tenure, from historic battles and milestones in time to the technological advancements in the field of weaponry. This time John opted to add a more personal touch into proceedings, particularly his experiences over the last few years and what the future may bring.
“I came up with the concepts for The Sword And The Cross and A Better World a few years ago which shaped the theme of the record. They were inspired by the experience that followed after the release of our last record where we were grounded, it was COVID and we were sitting there, not able to do anything. Work opportunities were down and the rent was going up and we’re already being squeezed. I had a period of depression and I went to see a therapist about my concerns for the future and they basically said all my concerns were valid, there is nothing they can do and offered me medication. I was reading some social theories by a British guy called Mark Fisher on capitalist realism about how we can’t create a better future because there is this prevailing logic that we’re already in the best possible society and are in the final form of civilisation so keep your head down enjoy it. If you go to a doctor or therapist they’ll say YOU have some mental health problems, YOU have low serotonin and they won’t talk about any of the potential conditions. They will talk about the fish but not the water. He poses the question that if the problem is low serotonin then why do so many people have that?”
He continues, “we repackage system problems and put it on the individuals so they think it’s their fault so I’m trying to pour these thoughts into that song with the lyrics ‘I swallow prescriptions, as the problem is me’ so it’s like the speaker has internalised this and believes he has to fix himself even though he’s observing the world deteriorating around him. I think when you listen to a lot of rock and metal music it’s all about standing tall and proud and I put almost none of that into this record, very purposefully because I feel like it’s more honest and more brutal trying to expressing something about how I feel, about life and the future and it’s a fitting theme for a thrash metal record where I’m screaming into the mic in the first place.”
It only takes a matter of minutes in the company of John to realise he is a very articulate, intelligent and scholarly individual who is just as knowledgeable about the past as he is the present. Sadly that level of awareness can be as much of a curse as a blessing. “They say ignorance is bliss right? That means that the corollary must mean knowledge is pain. Sometimes I do wish I could half lobotomize myself and not worry about life. Me and my wife moved out to the forest because living in the middle of Los Angeles was feeling a little too Blade Runner/Hive City for me and that really contributed to some of the negativity in this record.”
“I used the first person perspective a lot as it was a lot of me sharing my own heart and soul and then when someone listens along they are the ‘I’ and it doesn’t feel like I’m being preachy or telling someone they are wrong. There is another song which fits in tandem with A Better World called Cage Of Air. This was inspired by the fact I was driving by a Subway, I didn’t see the writing but because of those specific colours I knew it was a Subway and it was this moment where I realised that I meet people and sometimes I can’t remember their names but that exact yellow and green was Subway and that the red and blue would be Pepsi or the red and white would be Coca Cola and I didn’t ask for these associations but they’re stored in my memory and it raised the question, how much of my free will is actually mine? I’m trying to focus on those kind of realities and write that in a personal way. The lyrics ‘I’m free to choose how I cough up the rent’ are like, you can be whatever you want to be as long as you can afford the cost of living otherwise enjoy holding your cardboard sign out on the street! It really made me think about my prospects and what would the future be like for my children and it’s really antithetical to what I grew up thinking things would be like. I was a patriotic young American and I was a boy scout and everything so it was just trying to capture that feeling using a lot of different angles.”
The aforementioned The Sword And The Cross meticulously blends both past and present, making comparisons between the division of classes throughout generations. “I came up with the outro first, where the medieval lord is taunting everyone, ‘your children yet unborn, my sons shall be their lords’ and I thought that is phenomenally evil, that needs to go on the record,” explains John.
“I think it puts present day into stark contrast and blows away the myth that we have a free and equal society because we clearly don’t. There’s an economist called Thomas Piketty who showed in a study that America circa 2017 has greater wealth inequality than France did in 1789, before the revolution. Our seventh or eighth grade history teachers would tell us all about the nobles who took everything and left the poor with nothing which made the revolution inevitable and it’s worse now. People are just so complacent about it and it’s really wild to think. All these kind of thoughts were stewing around my head and I also had the question how did lords become lords and what was a castle actually for? Apparently it was more of a thing that you could ride forth from your castle and do whatever you want to the towns people and return to your castle. What’re they going to do? Besiege the castle? So the sword represents violence, direct, naked force and the cross represents ideology. Today it’s less ideology and more entrepreneurial myth, there is no way in hell that Jeff Bezos is worth 10 million times what your life is worth, no matter how smart he is or how hard he’s worked.”
The pandemic unfortunately derailed their well laid plans for touring and promoting on their last album cycle but they fully intend to make up for lost time in support of Wrath And Ruin. “We want to show off the new songs, the old songs and just try to wreck some faces!” Declares John. “We’ve got a US tour, a European/UK tour and then were heading back to Europe for a festival run. It’s more shows than I can even remember. We’re hoping that when the record comes out it may open up some more opportunities for us later this year or the beginning of next as we want to do what we couldn’t do with Weapons Of Tomorrow. Hopefully we can also get out to Southeast Asia or Australia. Strap yourselves in!”
Being in a touring band is by no means the glamorous depiction that many perceive, particularly in this current economy where the price of merely existing has increased significantly. Rather than let this become another obstacle to navigate, WARBRINGER are focused on leaving a lasting legacy that they can all be proud of. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years and the thing I’m proudest of is how we’ve gotten better over time,” discusses John. “I don’t know whether we’re gonna make it commercially playing thrash in the 2020’s but at some point I won’t have another album in me and I don’t want to write records for the sake of it. This one I still had a lot to say and a certain angle I wanted to approach it from. I have to put the art first and the commerce last because if I don’t I’m going against my principles and the very songs I’m writing! I don’t know when that’ll happen but I hope I’ll be able to look back and say that we have one of the most absolutely rock solid discographies or indeed metal. Yes, I’m biased but the consensus is we’ve been often praised for our consistency.”
Wrath And Ruin is out now via Napalm Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS118 here:
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