INTRODUCING: Ego Kill Talent
Your drummer is a former member of SEPULTURA. You’re best friends with Dave Grohl. Papa Het is dying for you to tour with METALLICA. For any fan of heavy metal and alternative rock music, this is like waking up on Christmas Day to the gold bullion of your wishlist sitting under the tree ready and waiting for you to indulge, a dream come true. For Brazilian alt-rockers EGO KILL TALENT, this is their reality, and it’s one that has inspired them since day one.
For a band that only formed back in 2014, following drummer and guitarist Jean Dolabella’s departure from thrash metal titans SEPULTURA, EGO KILL TALENT have risen astronomically through the ranks of Southern America’s music industry. Having shared stadium-sized stages with the world-conquering likes of the FOO FIGHTERS, QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE and SYSTEM OF A DOWN, they’ve earned their stripes crafting their brand of arena-ready alt-rock, complete with meteoric riffs and sing-alongs to shutdown showdowns.
Building on this momentum, their sophomore album, The Dance Between Extremes, was originally scheduled to drop into your eardrums earlier this year, but as the pandemic pushed the pause button on life as we know it, they took the decision to split it up into three EPs. As bassist and guitarist Theo Van Der Loo explains, this caught the band completely off guard. “I remember clearly the last week of December, our manager was talking from the US, and he said he spoke to the agent, and that there was a chance things would get cancelled because of COVID, but back then we didn’t have any cases in Brazil yet, so for us it wasn’t that real yet, so I didn’t take it so seriously, it was so far from my experience.”
For EGO KILL TALENT, 2020 was meant to be the year they took the jump from the small pond of Brazil to the Northern American and European big leagues, having spent time recording their record at the FOO FIGHTERS infamous Studio 606. It was an experience that ultimately left the band feeling enlightened, empowered and inspired, explains Theo. “It’s inspiring just being there, it inspires you to just go and get it, by just looking at the story it makes you go ‘yeah this is doable’ it gives you this pump, and that feeling was amazing. Like it’s so surreal what he’s [Dave Grohl] done in his career – he used to be the drummer of the biggest grunge band of the nineties and now he’s the singer and frontman of the biggest rock band of the century.
The songs that straddle the three EPs of The Dance Between Extremes fall somewhere between the hard-hitting riff-and-roll of FOO FIGHTERS and the high-octane genre-shifting energy of BIFFY CLYRO, and a bag full of big hooks that hit harder than a point blanc bullet. They attribute their musical direction, and their mission statements as a band, on the time they’ve spent on tour with the giants of the scene. “Every time we are on tour with a bigger band, we see it as a great opportunity to learn – it’s not just the playing, or just being on stage moment, it’s everything around it. The production, and the concerns you should have with what really matters to deliver a great show, and how to deal with the unexpected. There’s always the unexpected factor, it doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest artist on the planet or a new band, you’ll always have to deal with the unexpected in life.”
Funnily enough, EGO KILL TALENT have been dealing with the unexpected since day one. Being a rock band in a world hooked on being drip-fed lipgloss emo-pop is hard enough, but hailing from Southern and Latin America, now that’s a whole different ball game complete with it’s own unique set of challenges. “It’s the language barrier – if you want to develop internationally, it’s really hard to do it singing in Portuguese, simply because it’s harder for people to understand what you’re saying. I feel like English really fits with rock music, and the way it sounds, so that’s the first challenge right at the beginning.”
As far as cathartic vehicles go, EGO KILL TALENT are a breath of fresh air. They feed off of the emotional nature of their music, and they find comfort in their efforts to seek out equality in all that they do. Whilst they’ve all got dreams of being the next band to have a story as controversial and as captivating as MÖTLEY CRÜE’s The Dirt, what they really want the most is for their music to connect on a level unlike any other before: a human level.
“What we want the most is to connect to people on a deeper level, because deep inside we’re all the same. When you stop to think about it, the difference between human beings is very superficial, mostly it can be physical or just beliefs, but if you take beliefs and the physical body out of the way, we’re all the same.”
In the midst of a global pandemic, where live music is on lockdown and the industry is in a state of disarray, EGO KILL TALENT are a refreshingly revitalising revolution waiting to happen in the rock world. It’s time you hopped on for the ride.
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