Khemmis: Weaving Thoughts Into Song
Critical darlings of the doom scene, KHEMMIS have released three acclaimed albums so far and are on the cusp of their fourth album, Deceiver making its way into the world. We sat down with guitarist and vocalist Ben Hutcherson to talk about how they’ve approached this record and their growth as a band over the last decade together.
On the back of the success of last album Desolation, they’re not really feeling the pressure, at least not consciously. “We first sort of got critical acclaim with [second album] Hunted and I think back when we were writing Desolation we did feel and we tried not to overthink it. And with this album, both because we’re coming up on ten years as a band, it’s our fourth record and also writing it at the time of our lives when we did, this is I would say that we felt the least sort of external pressure on this album, that we felt on any album maybe since our debut,” Ben expresses when we ask. That’s not to say that a considerable amount of care and attention that’s gone into it, especially with the time that it was written.
“It’s weird to talk about the height of the pandemic and say anything remotely positive, but one of the upsides to writing [the album] during such a fucked up time was that we were really removed from the, I guess, like world of critics and by and large, social media. It wasn’t like we retreated into the woods to write this album,” he continues. “But the sort of nature of being in lockdown, being in quarantine and being isolated, allowed us to focus on the album and focus on what this album meant to us, to really dig in, I suppose.”
He’s very clear that this is the most KHEMMIS album that they’ve done to date; the one that they’ve been unafraid to let more influences shine through or to pull from areas outside of music. To hear Ben tell it, “this is really – this is like, the most fully realised version of KHEMMIS. And I think that has to do with that confidence in what we are as a band and also, what we are as people within this band.” He’s also quick to stress that a large part of Deceiver’s cohesion comes from their coming closer together not just as a band, but as friends within the band; “as a result of this introspection and these conversations, we have a clear idea of what [the band] is, and I think one of the things that we came to understand is that KHEMMIS is, to borrow a phrase from my friends in YOB, KHEMMIS is love. It’s about the love that the three of us have for each other, the mutual admiration and respect not just as musicians, but as humans and relearning how to be friends with each other in ways that aren’t predicated on being in a band.” The lockdowns gave them time to connect as friends; as people that talk about movies, as people that love cooking, share recipes and now can come back anew as a band to craft their most definitive statement to date.
It’s interesting to hear Ben talk of KHEMMIS as meaning love, when a cursory listen to them can unearth something very different – especially when delving into lyrics. Deceiver is about mental health, not just their own struggles (though it’s certainly informed by it), but also tackles the idea of existing in a world where the predominant way of being is to suffer. Lyrically, it’s their own version of Dante’s descent into his Inferno but this wasn’t necessarily an immediate, upfront decision. “I don’t think we were thinking about the image of Dante and the descent initially but like a lot of things, just because we weren’t explicitly thinking about it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,” he explains of the emergence. “We wound up with a lot of sort of literary references in the titles [though], especially to Greek and Roman mythology, it wound up being sort of serendipitous that the trajectory of these songs mirrored, to some extent at least, the story of Dante and how that connects to this idea of the deceiver or deception.”
The songs themselves tackle suffering; the band always have, but they’re keen to express that there’s still some light, some hope available even in the face of misery. “There’s that balance,” Ben describes, “that balance shifts from album to album with us, from song to song, but here the imagery of the descent and descending, whether it’s the individual descending into the abyss or the world into the wretched, chaotic form it’s in now. We’re not telling you things are gonna be okay, we’re not telling you that the fucking sun’s gonna come out and the sky is gonna be blue. But we’re also not going to bash you over the head with the horrors of existence because there has to be that element of hope.”
It’s a bold statement but one they clearly believe; despite the horrors of a a pandemic ravaging the world and their own struggles with mental health, they’ve grown closer together and in that, reconnected on a deeper level to each other and their music. It’s led to the most KHEMMIS album they’ve ever written and arguably, their best to date…
Deceiver is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.
Like KHEMMIS on Facebook.