INTRODUCING: Filth Is Eternal

FILTH IS ETERNAL are as punk as it comes. The Seattle-based four-piece’s latest semi-self-titled full-length, Love Is A Lie, Filth Is Eternal, is everything the genre was always meant to be – fast, furious, and ready to take on the world. It also marks the start of a new chapter for the band, who until recently went by the even more in your face moniker of FUCKED AND BOUND. The name change hints at evolution, and is something that’s definitely borne out in the music on the new record. For guitarist Brian McClelland, it was a move they needed to make sooner rather than later. “The reality was that that name was very vicious and people knew what kind of band it was right off the bat, which I love,” he explains. “I really appreciate the immediacy of it, but it became very difficult operationally to connect with people.”

It’s an exciting time then, for FILTH IS ETERNAL, who find themselves at a point McClelland and co-founder Lisa Mungo may not have envisaged back when they were putting the band together. “We started FUCKED AND BOUND and we wanted to just do punk – like raw, quick, fast songs – but we didn’t think it was necessarily gonna be a long-running project. We thought it might be like one of those things where you kick out some seven inches or something and that’s sort of the lifespan of the band, but as it grew and people kept coming to shows and responding to the material we were writing, we realised it had a bit more of a body to it.”

Part and parcel of FILTH IS ETERNAL’s recent transformation has been the recruitment of bassist Rah Davis, a former touring member of CATTLE DECAPITATION, and drummer Mat Chandler of the Seattle-based death metal band RE-BURIED. It’s with this fleshed out line-up that McClelland feels the band have been able to broaden their horizons significantly. “We got these new guys and we started writing and we just really wanted to incorporate some new kinds of influences and some new directions. And since we had a little time to tour on the material and sort of learn about the way that people interact with songs, we got to shift how we present it.”

“One thing that we thought about with writing this new material for Love Is A Lie, Filth Is Eternal was the crowd dynamic,” he adds. “We wanted to write songs that had different vibes for people in a live setting, so it’s like you play some fast stuff, play some mid-tempo stuff, fast stuff, mid-tempo… And so that was kind of a good opportunity thinking about it in that platform to reach out and kind of get some of that death metal influence, or some powerviolence influence – just some fun stuff like that mixed in with the hardcore.”

Even with its broader influences on show, Love Is A Lie… is never anything less than a raging, relentless record, tearing through 12 tracks in less than 20 minutes. True to form, McClelland’s song-writing process sounds similarly intense. “As a guitar player I kick out the songs pretty quickly, I’ll write riffs or parts fairly fast. And then I usually give them to everyone else and we talk about structure, but I just slam so much material at them. Per record I try and write about 20 songs that we can then pick from… usually between like a minute and two minutes, that’s where we like to be. We have a running joke that’s like ‘whip up a pit in 60 seconds or less!’”

With experience in the more progressive and technical HE WHOSE OX IS GORED, you’d think playing scrappy little punk songs would be a walk in the park for McClelland, but FILTH IS ETERNAL’s music requires its own kind of exertion. “What people don’t realise about these songs sometimes is playing that fast is kind of a feat. You start getting over 200bpm and that takes its own kind of practice to be able to do things consistently. A lot of those songs, even if it’s a one minute song, if you look at it there’s a lot going on in that 60 seconds. The HE WHOSE OX IS GORED stuff is very cerebral and we focus on the atmosphere, but with FILTH IS ETERNAL we just knock it out and it’s very pummelling. Performing that material can be very physical and very athletic, and very demanding on your body.”

Whatever it may demand of him, it’s clear McClelland wouldn’t have it any other way. “Music is therapy for me personally,” he explains. “I am admittedly kind of a turbulent person sometimes, I’ve been up and down and I’ve worked through a lot of depression and things like that over the years. It can be very difficult dealing with modern life and trying to find out where you fit in, there’s a lot going on there.”

It will come as a surprise to no-one that as we wrap up our interview McClelland indicates he and FILTH IS ETERNAL have absolutely no intentions of slowing down. “We’re excited to put out this record, hit the road, we wanna record the next record, hit the road. We wanna come see y’all over there, make some new friends, say what’s up. We wanna go to Japan, we wanna travel the world. We have this joke that’s like ‘power chords across the world’ – that’s one of our goals. We just wanna play some riffs and make some new friends.”

Love Is A Lie, Filth Is Eternal is out now via Church Road Records (UK & EU) and Quiet Panic (US).

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