Memoriam: This Pain Will End

Five albums in seven years is no small feat, even for the sprightliest of us. Yet, that’s exactly what MEMORIAM have achieved since forming out of the ashes of death metal legends BOLT THROWER. As new album Rise To Power mirrors their own meteoric rise, they’re using old school principles to push death metal into new territories.

“The essence of what we’re trying to do is recreate that feeling of how it was when we first started out doing music in the late 80s when bands were very prolific in their creative output,” says vocalist Karl Willets from his home in the West Midlands, slinging back snowballs long after Christmas. “It was pretty normal for bands to have an album every year, we want to try and create that old school feeling again.”

Whilst Willetts, joined by bassist Frank Healy, drummer Spike T. Smith, and guitarist Scott Fairfax, aren’t “resting on their laurels by moving forwards and not dwelling too much on what we do” by “parking it and moving on”, Rise To Power has taken slightly longer to see the light of the day. And that’s a good thing, suggests Willetts. “Having that little bit extra of six months helps us spend a little bit more time structuring the music, structuring the song and the flow, and it gives me the opportunity to demo the songs, which is something I’ve never done throughout my history of writing lyrics.”

Whilst a global pandemic put paid to their plans to take death metal back to its roots, it gave MEMORIAM all the ammunition they needed. Rise To Power, like 2021’s To The End before it, builds its world of war on real-life events. “The last album was driven politically through issues of Brexit and austerity, and Black Lives Matter and the rapid rise of nationalism and the right wing ideology that is across the globe, whilst this album is entrenched within the situation that exists in our world right now, which is the war on our doorstep in Ukraine.”

Willetts is no stranger to singing songs of war; he’s spent the past 35 years preaching from the gospel of it. So the irony of Rise To Power’s themes is not lost on MEMORIAM’s General. “It’s ironic that I’ve been quite well known for writing lyrics which have a thematic structure around the theme of war, but it seems now in 2023 that those lyrics are more relevant now than they ever have been in the past because it’s here, it’s happening; it’s on our doorstep, it’s everywhere throughout the media, it’s in your face. It’s shocking, it’s horrifying, it’s brutal, and it’s real.”

Whilst Willetts believes it’s a “terrible tragedy for the planet, but a marvellous source of lyrical inspiration”, he’s just as quick to accept his responsibility as a voice for those being silenced. “I think it’s important for me to stand up and say things about the world that I think are wrong. As a musician, as a lyricist, as a frontman, it’s my privileged position to be able to stand on my soapbox and pontificate about things that I think are important.”

Some might say that MEMORIAM are dreamers, wishing for a world without war, yet Willetts accepts the challenges that lie ahead. “I don’t think I’m going to change people’s minds, but maybe I can relate to people that have got the same kind of mindset and make them think that’s the way it is.” Sure, not everyone will sign up to the MEMORIAM manifesto, but Willetts himself has benefited from it.

“At this point in my life I can write these songs a lot better than I could 10 or 20 years ago, because I’ve lived it” admits Willetts matter-of-factly. “As you get older, you do tend to have more issues in grief and sorrow because you lose people, that’s just the way of life. People can relate to what I’m trying to say in these songs, and I always end them with some form of hope, because it’s through these experiences that make us who we are. The scope of our individual experiences and how we deal with them ultimately makes us who we are, and This Pain is a very good example of that.”

This Pain, Rise To Power’s towering finale, is filled with hope despite it’s despicable dirge of progressive death metal. As Willett’s impassioned delivery of ‘this pain will end, my heart shall mend again; this pain will end, and I shall live again’ empowers you to rise to power and make positive changes in your life. Of course, every end has a start, and Rise To Power’s Never Forget, Never Again (6 Million Dead) starts in history’s darkest days: the Holocaust.

“I think it’s really important because with the rise of that xenophobic, right wing nationalism there seems to be a big kind of Holocaust denial, and I think it’s important to stand against that and make a point early on in the album, which we do right at the start. With our cards on the table, I can maintain that political output which I’m trying to achieve through MEMORIAM.”

Never Forget, Never Again (6 Million Dead) isn’t just an integral part of Rise To Power’s mission statement. It’s the song Willetts has spent more than a decade trying to write. In his own words, “it’s the most rewarding song,” simply because he’s “wanted to write a song about the Holocaust for the past 10/15 years, it’s something that I’ve always set out to write on each album, but never got round to doing it. I never found the right structure, or song, or riff that gave me that hook, that feel to write that song – it’s such an emotive subject matter, you have to give it justice in the lyrics and delivery”.

Rise To Power is a journey of emotions, a no man’s land of sadness and sorrow, love and loss, hope and hatred. It is yours to crawl through like the barbed wire trenches it’s inspired by. But Willetts and his bandmates in MEMORIAM do hope you’ll “enjoy the diversity and the tones and textures and what we’re trying to achieve with this, and listen to it as a whole. It would be great for it to just engage with people and enjoy it for what it is, and allow us to continue our exciting journey. 35 years of doing this and we’re still going strong, potentially stronger than ever before, and it’s incredible, it’s marvellous.”

What’s most marvellous about MEMORIAM’s Rise To Power is that they were never meant to be anything more than a tribute to BOLT THROWER’s Martin Kearns, who’s passing saw the band call it a day. Yet here they are, seven years on, sounding bigger and better than ever. And Martin remains the catalyst to their chaos.

“Martin’s death was definitely the reason we started doing this, I wanted to create some light, and some joy out of an otherwise dark place for myself. When you lose people close to you, it makes you re-evaluate your own life and make decisions on what you want to achieve. It makes you realise that life is short, and you do have to grab the opportunities and do what’s best for yourself at the end of the day.”

So, having spent nearly a decade building a band-sized shrine in honour of Kearns, what does Willetts think his brother-in-arms would think of MEMORIAM seven years and five albums in? “Martin wouldn’t have wanted me to stop doing the thing that I love doing, he would take pride in the fact I have continued to do something but it’s ironic, because just before he passed away, we were thinking of doing something together as a side project because yeah, BOLT THROWER was great but not particularly busy or active, so we had quite a bit of spare time so we were thinking about getting a little side project together, so this in a way is a tribute to that idea that we had.”

As Rise To Power sees MEMORIAM take bold new steps into death metal’s future, Willetts raises a toast to his fallen brother and to the band’s future, as it’s given him everything he could wish for. “I get my sense of identity out of doing it; this is me, this is what i do best, and the joy that comes from it, not just for myself, but for others, is an incredible, privileged position to be in, so I will have a drink to Martin and I think he’d be shining down and laughing at this point in time thinking ‘what an idiot!’”

Rise To Power is out now via Reaper Entertainment.

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