KEN Mode: Coping Through Cacophony
There are few bands more suited to the task of responding to the hellscape of the past couple of years than KEN MODE. For over two decades, the Canadian noise-rockers have devoted themselves to utter cacophony, their output often sitting as comfortably alongside the sharpest edges of early 00s chaotic hardcore as it could among the most suffocating slabs of sludge and post-metal. Riding high on the acclaim of 2018’s Loved, the band had actually started crafting a follow-up before the pandemic was on anyone’s radar, but as guitarist/vocalist Jesse Matthewson explains, the cataclysmic events of 2020 prompted them to hit the reset button. “None of it mattered,” he claims. “It didn’t feel relevant to me anymore.”
Their slate clean, Matthewson and co. emerged instead with Null, the first in a two-part arc for which the second instalment is already fully mixed and mastered. Before we get ahead of ourselves with the sequel however, there is much to dig into with the album at hand. True to form, it’s a record that paints in different shades of extremity, from all-out angular chaos, to works of throbbing industrial menace and slow-building dynamic heft. As mentioned, it provides a suitably harrowing soundtrack to the times we find ourselves in, but, as Matthewson works his way to the bottom of the tallest mug of coffee we’ve ever seen, he makes it abundantly clear that Null was born almost entirely out of emotional necessity.
“Getting to make all these songs was really the main thing that got me through this time,” offers the KEN MODE frontman. “So much of the writing of this album from a lyrical perspective is about dealing with your own mental illness when your coping mechanisms have been stripped away. I spoke to many friends throughout the whole pandemic who certainly had it worse than I did – people who have clearly more intense mental illness that needs more management – but similarly they had some of these coping mechanisms stripped away too. It was just like living in your own personal hell for two years.”
“For me specifically, live music and Muay Thai are the things that keep me balanced, and neither of those were happening,” he continues. “If anything, the Muay Thai community that I was a part of here really fell apart because that community takes ignorance to a whole new level. So that was a fucking bummer for me. I’m still kind of coping slash mourning the loss of that because I don’t have the teammates that I used to anymore, but I’m putting a lot of weight in the musical community because it seems like it didn’t go as crazy, or at least not in a stupid way. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone when we get back out on the road.”
As we speak, that return to the road is finally on the horizon; KEN MODE are weeks away from a run of Canadian dates, with a longer tour of the US scheduled for the month after. When they do get there though, things may look a little different. Having recently recruited the multi-talented Kathryn Kerr – who previously contributed saxophone to Loved – as a full-time member, Matthewson explains with excitement that the biggest gain from this is the band will be able to recreate the songs from Null in their full and cacophonous glory. “We’ve been teaching her how to play all these bloody parts,” he smiles. “She probably has the hardest job in the band where she’s jumping from this synth to another to saxophone to piano and changing patches on the fly. It’s a bit of an ordeal for her!”
Kerr has no trouble making her presence known on the record either, her contributions adding a bleak dystopian depth to a band who hardly needed help in that regard. Drawing, as ever, from the school of SWANS and THE MEVLINS, Null is a record that flows and evolves with clear and decisive intent. It may be the first half of a two-parter, but the band were always insistent that it would stand as a work of its own.
“We like constructing a well thought-out story with our albums,” emphasises Matthewson. “You see this happen so much where bands that get popular generally do one sound – and they do it well – but that’s why people end up tuning out after an album or two because it’s boring after a while. I think that’s probably hurt us over the years because when people are looking for that sort of thing, we ain’t that band. We’re not going to do the same thing over and over again and what we do is not easy to categorise. I’ve seen people call us a noise rock band, a sludge band, a hardcore band, a post-hardcore band – I don’t know what the fuck we are!”
Matthewson is similarly non-prescriptive about the record’s themes and lyrics, and as we wrap up he seems largely unfazed by what people may or may not take away from Null when they finally hear it. “I don’t necessarily assume that people will sympathise or relate to the lyrical content,” he admits. “Obviously it’s a rewarding feeling when people talk about your writing and can relate to certain sentiments, even if it’s way off from the sentiment that you meant of it. The most fun part of art is hearing people talking about it back to me. It’s fascinating when they get something completely different from what I originally intended.”
Null isout now via Artoffact Records.
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