Kublai Khan TX: Consistency Is Key
For a band who deal as exclusively in aggro as KUBLAI KHAN TX, you won’t meet many more laidback individuals than their frontman Matt Honeycutt. We join him on a break from his day job at a tattoo parlour about a week ahead of the release of their new EP Lowest Form Of Animal, and while the five tracks on the record in question could have you expecting an intimidating and even stand-offish personality, Honeycutt is anything but. “I don’t get too high-strung about stuff,” he tells us. “I hate yelling, I hate a lot of the stuff that you would see on the stage and think ‘dang, he’s probably wild and chaotic all the time’ – there’s a time and a place for everything, that’s what it is.”
“I have a very good life,” he adds. “I have a lot of things to be thankful for and I feel pretty blessed every day that I wake up just to still be here and doing this with everybody. When it comes to the band, that’s really kind of shoehorned its way into being my outlet as far as it helps me expel a lot of that negative energy in a more controlled way. Everybody gets frustrated and it’s super easy to go out and take it out on everybody you see, but where does that get you? It gets you fucking nowhere, so it’s a whole lot easier to just filter it through the band.”
Of course, the results of this filtration have manifested in some of the hardest hitting hardcore of the past decade, with the band managing to carve out an increasingly identifiable sound even as they draw on many of the genre’s tried and tested tropes. For Honeycutt, the development of this identity was “probably about 85% natural, the rest is just us trying to put some brain power behind it and seeing which direction we want to push it. It’d be tough for us to write anything else, like this is just what happens when you’ve got these four people together and you’ve told them to write music. It could be right now or it could be 50 years from now and I feel like we’re still gonna put out a similar sound because that’s just the four of us put together.”
As well as the music, a large part of that identity comes down to the band’s focus on real world issues, with this latest release touching on everything from mental health and suicide rates to addiction and the sex trade in just 14 minutes. “This band has never been like a fantasy project for all of us,” explains Honeycutt. “It’s always been very grounded in reality both tonally and subject-wise. As far as when I write the lyrics and stuff like that, I try not to veer too much from the idea that we’re still a heavy band, so if we can filter positive messages through a negative sound then I feel like you can really start to streamline things where people will be picking up on topics and conversations and ideas that they might not have looked towards otherwise.”
With this as their M.O. Honeycutt and co. have maintained an impressively steady climb over the past decade or so, to the point that they’ve now attracted the patronage of everyone from hardcore legend Scott Vogel of TERROR, who appears on the opening track of the new EP, to actress Kate Beckinsale (“Your guess is as good as mine” muses Honeycutt). Naturally, the last couple of years of the pandemic haven’t really phased them either, with Honeycutt describing it as just another challenge to stack on top of all the others that already come with being in a band.
Casting an eye over their journey so far, he reflects: “If I’m just being honest and transparent, it kind of just fell into our lap. There was a lot of hard work that went into it, and a lot of time and effort, but looking back on it there was never some clear cut thing where it was like ‘this is where stuff changed’. It’s always just kind of been going. With that being said, when I think about the band that we were ten years ago there are so many things that have changed and there’s so much that’s different, but then there are also so many things that haven’t changed one bit, and I think that’s kind of what helps make our band what it is.”
“I believe in consistency in all facets of life,” he summarises. “And I think if you can remain consistent you can really play the long game to reach your goals and not get so stressed about what’s happening right now or what’s going to happen directly in the near future and think about the long run.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Honeycutt isn’t too fussed about making overly detailed plans for the band going forward. As we come to wrap up, he emphasises: “Ever since we started doing it the whole band has always been like a slow incline, and we’ve always said once we start taking steps backwards it’ll probably be about time to cut the cord. But things just keep getting better for us, we keep putting out music that people keep gravitating towards.” We couldn’t agree more, and if Lowest Form Of Animal is anything to go by, that isn’t about to change anytime soon.
Lowest Form Of Animal is out now via Rise Records.
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