Twelve Foot Ninja: Saying No To Riff Porn
Australia’s TWELVE FOOT NINJA have built a considerable reputation for being one of the most unpredictable, fearless bands in metal with their creative fusion of genre-hopping material resulting in them building an impressive fan base far and wide. Their previous release Outlier arrived back in 2016 and the sizeable gap has left everyone waiting excitedly with bated breath to get their hands on the long awaited follow-up which has since been entitled Vengeance.
“We kind of made the strategic decision that we wouldn’t put out an album, kind of in a vacuum” explains guitarist Stevic MacKay. “We put a lot of our time into building other assets like I made a graphic novel, we’ve got a fantasy fiction novel, a video game. We put a lot of our energy into music videos because we had all the time to do it. It’s been positive and negative. Positive in a sense that we have had the opportunities to do all of these other ventures and we’ve now got a rollout plan which is pretty much the culmination of ten years of work but the negative is we’ve been sitting on this music for a while and we’ve really missed that element of human feedback that you usually get when you create something. It’s been difficult for the band to work on something and then not be able to share it.”
The restrictions in Australia have been considerably stricter than in other places around the world so this has not made this album cycle the easiest of processes for the band, but it has allowed them to explore other creative outlets to coincide with the release and build up the excitement for the fans. “What has really affected us is the fact we haven’t been able to get together and rehearse,” admits Stevic. “Like I haven’t been in the same room as the guys for over a year! I just live in this room now like a caveman. I really enjoyed putting together the graphic novel and the comic book, they all tie into this lore of who TWELVE FOOT NINJA is. The main protagonist is called Kiyoshi and I explain how the band fits into it all with multiple branches of reality and a kind of Sci-Fi concept, a lot of work has gone into it and I’m very eager to see whether people get it or whether I just went down this epic rabbit hole! It’s all part of the fun I guess.”
Vengeance is poised to be just as innovative and forward-thinking as their previous material. Further pushing their boundaries into more complex and ingenuitive spaces. “We’ve explored into a lot of different genres that we’ve not experimented with before,” discusses Stevic. “It’s got a bit of an 80s vibe to it and some orchestral stuff. It’s also got some really heavy parts, it’s a mixed bag! I think one of the biggest changes this time round was the emphasis on the lyrics. I taught lyric writing at a university for about five years and I didn’t actually incorporate any of that teaching into the band. There was a lot of collaboration with Nick and we experimented with different techniques and really honed in on the lyrical content. We really tried to make the melodies adhere to the natural flow of the language as opposed to some bands which don’t pay a lot of attention to how the melodies actually coincide with the flow of the sentence and how it is delivered. We wanted to avoid becoming riff porn and being amazingly technical but not really having any substance.”
Whilst the pandemic has caused many obstacles with bands not being able to actually tour it has opened the doors for the prospects of remote working with one another and creating exciting opportunities to do guest features with friends in the industry that they may have not necessarily had the chance to do otherwise due to scheduling commitments. This was a venture which TWELVE FOOT NINJA wanted to take advantage of and add something extra special to Vengeance. “We did a track called Over And Out with Tatiana from JINJER and I think people have really been digging that as they’ve not really heard us do a collaboration before,” states Stevic. “We played in the Ukraine and JINJER supported us back then! They were saying TWELVE FOOT NINJA was an influence of theirs and we hit it off straight away, then they kind of exploded. Tatiana has gained global recognition and rightfully so, she’s an extraordinary vocal talent. We really wanted to work with a female vocalist and thought Tatiana would be an appropriate choice, thankfully she agreed to it. It made me laugh as someone wrote a comment saying she is basically a cheat code to get views!”
Vengeance is out now via Volkanik Music.
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