Krysthla: Taking British Metal Worldwide
It’s fitting to be talking to KRYSTHLA, a band who are absolute work-horses of the British metal scene, in the grounds of Bloodstock Festival, a festival who are an essential pillar for homegrown talent. After four years of grinding across the country and putting out two albums which perked the ears of the powers that be, the Northampton crew have earned themselves a spot on the Ronnie James Dio Stage just before they drop the new record Worldwide Negative. “The stars have aligned nicely.” guitarist Neil Hudson tells Distorted Sound on a warm but excessively windy day in the home of Bloodstock, Catton Park. “It’s really nice to know that the hard work we’ve put in up and down the country and with the other two records, it’s all culminated in today’s opening the main stage of Bloodstock and then a new album out.”
Before discussion and dissection of the new album, Worldwide Negative begins we briefly touch on the UK metal charge which KRYSTHLA are on the frontlines of. “I think the underground metal scene in this country is growing so fast and there are so many new bands coming out and releasing stuff, and everyone’s trying to get on Bloodstock and there are new festivals popping up everywhere.”
A vital part of the UK metal scene and an amazing platform for new bands is the Bloodstock Metal 2 The Masses competitions, bands across the country compete to represent their city at the mighty Bloodstock Festival. “With things like Bloodstock, for a festival to put their hand at the bottom of the bucket and muddy those still waters that are the underground metal scene in this country and all over Europe.” Hudson adds “Metal 2 The Masses is giving young bands an opportunity to showcase what they can do. Yeah it’s a competition and I know a lot of people don’t agree with that, but you’re with your friends you do your thing if you don’t win then you come back next year, you’re all basically vying to do this festival and progress as a band.”
It’s clear he remembers the grind of being a fresh-faced band well and truly appreciates the helping hand Bloodstock are lending them, after all, outside of KRYSTHLA, Hudson records and produces with many of the upstarts who’ve graced the festival’s smaller stages like DIJNOVA and SEVEN HELLS. But Hudson also acknowledges that one of the key parts of cutting your teeth with projects like Metal 2 The Masses is dealing with rejection. “It’s a character-building experience for bands to go through because when you get in this industry, you do get people who want you to do wrong no matter what, and they can’t wait to put the boot in.” Neil knows the scene in and out, he’s been a part of it and watching it transform for over two decades and has built a callous towards some of the tougher parts of the industry. “You do develop a thick skin over the years. We’ve been playing together with our old bands like GUTWORM and some of us were in a band called VIOLATION back in 1993! We’ve been playing together for 26 years and we’ve been through the album demo thing many many times and you grow a really thick hide.”
But the half a lifetime of hard work and building up this thick hide pays off as on a surprisingly sunny Saturday morning the Bloodstock family personally welcomes them to the festival’s biggest stage, the Ronnie James Dio Stage. It’s an uphill battle trying to shake the hangovers of a field of metalheads but ever-resilient KRYSTHLA pulls it off. “We’d prepped ourselves for a slightly thinner on the ground turnout because it is the Saturday morning, everyone’s been here a couple of days now and you think well maybe the hangovers are really kicking in. But after the third song, everyone was partying and by the middle of the set we were like ‘ah, okay it’s actually really full’. So we were pretty chuffed, we were giving each other little looks onstage like ‘Yesss’” Not just a glorious moment for the festival, or the band, but the British metal scene felt like some of the good guys won on that morning, and the gargantuan new record Worldwide Negative which dropped mere days later feels like a victory lap for KRYSTHLA
On to the pressing matter of the new album then Neil, it’s been two years since the last album Peace In Our Time how has the band progressed since then?
Neil: Writing-wise we really wanted to experiment a bit more with layers and dynamics in general. I think every band wants to get bigger and heavier with each release, I think that’s a natural progression for all bands. I’ve got quite a few riffs and ideas stemming back five years, like little sections I’ve had which have never really had a home, rather than crowbarring them in I just kept them aside. And there were moments on this record where they came to life and were perfect for certain sections. That meant the inclusion of clean vocals which in a band like us a lot of people will go “aaaah, you’ve started singing now have ya? sellout!”. I think tastefully done a brutally heavy band can do that, I mean take WHITECHAPEL for example. It’s astounding, I absolutely love it. I think it works really well in that context. We kind of went in with that intent, there are only a couple of tint bits on the record but for a band like us that’s quite a big thing, it’s a little bit of a gamble. This album ebbs and flows a lot more than the other two. The other two are full-on ‘you’re gonna get your head kicked in!’ level but this one is more light and shade, push and pull. It paces itself and makes for a better listen.
That kind of element often reminds me of acts like FEAR FACTORY.
Neil: Well yeah, that was an absolute game-changer when FEAR FACTORY started introducing that technique and that tone and style, it blew everyone’s minds! The way it all worked and flowed, then everyone started copying it. You have to make sure you do it individually and tastefully. Just adding a few bits and pieces here and there lets people know you have got another avenue you can go down when you want to. It opens up possible things for the next record as well.
Worldwide Negative came to number two on the Amazon new metal and rock charts, just behind SLIPKNOT. That’s amazing, how was it to watch it climb the charts?
Neil: It was crazy to see, it’s kind of odd because the first album did really well on the amazon thing. The first album got to something like five or six on the metal pre-order chart and we were like “oh wow, that was really out of the blue” but I think there was a fair amount of old GUTWORM fans and VIOLATION fans, and our vocalist’s (Adi Mayes) other old band DEADEYE fans, a lot of people invested in us as friends they all bought stuff which was cool. As the albums went on and your fan base grows naturally when you tour and you gig, the second album also go to number two and we were like holy shit! This is just weird. Then this one came out and went straight into number two as well! With SLIPKNOT putting out an album you are gonna come second fiddle, they are a bit of a monster. But it’s a really rewarding feeling to know that a bunch of friends can put their heads together and write some stuff and go out and play and it all comes back in waves. Yeah we do it cause we love it, and we would still write music if weren’t out gigging, but for everyone to enjoy it, for it to get us on the main stage it’s pretty awesome. You can’t really ask for more.
I think a big part of that is the fact metalheads seem to still love getting a physical product rather than streaming things.
Neil: Yeah, when I’m president of planet earth, on things like Spotify you will be able to upload the album and it will be there for maybe two months and then it’s gone. Then you get a taste of it, you can download it to your phone keep it for two months, get a really good listen to it, then decide if you want it or not. Then you could download it or go and buy it, but then you actually pay for it and then the band get money. It won’t ever happen because people want things for free which is understandable, but if you want festivals and bands to be a success the revenue needs to be there. It’s kind of being bottlenecked in places which were never bottlenecked before, people always bought the albums and it was part of the income for a band but it’s been taken away because of streaming and the amount of money bands get for streaming is very low as we all know. So now we’re all basically travelling t-shirt salesman that play music at the same time. You hope that the people dig your stuff enough to invest in your material or your clothes or your added extras patches etc. I can understand that people want things for free, it’s just human nature to want to get by, we can’t afford to be alive nowadays. I remember years ago me and my friends would go out and go CD shopping, you’d spend £60 on a few albums and a t-shirt from your local HMV. Nobody does that now, I’m sure it’s quite a rare thing but to get that dynamic back would be brilliant for bands and the industry, but I think it’s a long way off, we need to find a way around it.
On to the subject matter of the album, where does the title Worldwide Negative come from?
Neil: We’re gonna get deep now. It’s gonna get heavy. I don’t know anybody that isn’t or hasn’t been affected or doesn’t know somebody that’s been affected by being depressed or suicidal feeling. There’s a grey cloud over planet earth at the minute. Everyone’s miserable. I think we lead a pretty unnatural life, like I said a minute ago being alive is expensive and I think it makes people miserable knowing we slave away in jobs the majority of us hate just to be alive and have food. I think over the years it’s slowly starting to crack the human psyche a little bit. What with our wonderful world leaders all being corrupt mates behind closed doors, they’re all on the same team really, and they use us as collateral. I think we’re starting to see the human mind break a little bit and I think we’re all under a massive grey cloud. One of the tracks on the album is loosely based on an article I was reading about a girl in America, she’s twelve years old, and she live-streamed her suicide on Facebook. I’m sitting there reading this thing going “Jesus wept” and my little girl who is eight was on the sofa sitting next to me doing her homework, I was just looking at her and it makes you think that that sort of level of misery is reaching out children and our kids what is this next generation gonna be like? We’re gonna be so mentally broken I don’t know what we’re gonna do.
Obviously not everyone is like that, some people find coping mechanisms and get through it but it just seems like the human mind has taken a battering over the last 50 years or so since the industrial revolution where we were forced into work. I don’t have any answers, to be honest, I just write about what I see and the album is a snapshot of the last few years. Worldwide Negative is documentation of everyone being utterly miserable and we don’t know why. The album cover is actually my daughter, my little girl. We were chatting about her school work and stuff. She was really stressed out with school work and she was panicking about stuff, and she’s eight! She just pulled this face and said “Dad, when I get stressed out I pull this face at school” and I was like “MATE, don’t move” I took a photo of this face she pulled. It’s a child worried about the things in her life eight years old and that’s just gonna carry on, they grow up with these worries and fears, and it’s worse now than it’s ever been. Life is so unnatural for humans, yeah we have nice big TVs and cars and stuff but that’s not a natural thing, it’s not a necessity. I think we’re confusing having luxuries for a healthy life balance and I think we’re throwing away a lot of our happiness just by being alive.
I think one of the reasons why people feel so at home at festivals is because this is a much more natural human experience.
Neil: Yes! It’s a tribal mentality, humans want to be together. People have this facade of saying “oh, I hate people” you don’t, yeah there are some people who piss you off where you work but we love our friends, we like hanging out with our chosen family and yeah this is a bonding experience. Vibration is the key to everything, and here we are, it’s all energy. We feed off the audience, they feed off the band, the sound systems are emitting the highest and loudest vibrations and we love it. And when we’re here we feed off it and it’s a very communal thing. I think the way life works now it makes you separate, it’ an easy thing to manipulate people using social media and the internet to keep you in your house and buying things you don’t need rather than integrating with people and having your own ideas and thoughts cause you never know where that might lead to, that’s a bad thing init? The establishment doesn’t want you thinking about stuff, heaven forbid, that would be terrible. So to come to this it’s a chance to forget about how rubbish your life may or may not be, you just come here and have fun for a few days and experience a very bounding thing. Music is key, coming here is good for the soul.
Worldwide Negative is out now via Plastic Head Distribution.
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