To thine own self be true might be great advice but it’s not an easy creed to follow in the world of music. Between record companies clamoring for a more commercial single, managers subtly tweaking your look, or just fans that don’t appreciate experimentation (or lack thereof since there’s really no pleasing anyone), it can be hard to listen to that voice deep inside of you, the one that started the fire that got you playing music in the first place. Before long, you’re not playing music anymore because it feels like that inferno will burn you up from the inside if you don’t get it out; you’re playing to stay hip, to please everyone so you can remain on top, to fit in with the latest trends. Somewhere along the way, countless musicians lose what makes them remarkable and memorable in the first place and simply settle into being bankable.
Karl Willetts doesn’t have that problem. First and foremost, the man has never played a “bankable” style of music and has rejected the myriad moments in death metal when bands started to tip more into a commercial, radio-friendly version of the extremity that first put them on the map. No, throughout his 30+ year career, Willetts has made a name for himself through his time with the legendary Bolt Thrower and with his current band Memoriam through never backing down, never selling out, and never giving in to what popular opinion might say his next move should be. Throughout it all, Willetts has maintained the punk mentality that carried him through his youth and has continued to make records of the highest caliber in terms of musicianship and in artistic integrity.
I caught up with Willetts recently through Zoom to chat about his legendary career and how he views the current state of metal. We chatted about everything from the formation of Memoriam, to how he keeps his vocals strong, to just how satisfying it is to piss off Nazis (now as always, the Metal Plague stance remains: Nazi metallers fuck off). It was honestly a huge honor that death metal’s greatest vocalist took time out of his life to chat with our little fanzine about his career and what the future holds for Memoriam. There have been a few times doing Metal Plague where I’ve thought, if nothing else, that experience made it all worth it. This was one of those interviews.
First off, I just kinda wanted to get your story of how Memoriam started.
Karl: After doing my former band, which is well documented, for a considerable amount of years, on and off, the last period was particularly significant and quite successful and I think it built a lasting legacy and reputation. It unfortunately came to an untimely end due to the death of Martin “Kiddie” Kearns, the drummer. A decision was pretty much made that it was not something we could stomach moving forward with. At that point, I thought, well, it’s a bit miserable, a bit depressing, a bit sad. What do I want to do? When you lose someone, a close mate, it just makes you take stock of your own life and forces you to make some decisions, which sometimes can have a positive effect. I thought, I’ll do something positive out of all this negativity and sadness and create something new, something I’d always wanted to do for a long time.
I always wanted to play in a band again with my good, lifetime friend, Andrew Whale, the former drummer for Bolt Thrower. He was one of the reasons I got into Bolt Thrower in the first place, through him and his friendship. I felt that I wanted to embrace being in a band and doing what we did when we first started out with Bolt Thrower and try and recreate some joy and pleasure through that. I approached Whale and asked if he was up for it. He hadn’t played drums for awhile, a few years, so he didn’t know whether he’d be able to but it’s just like riding a bike and he picked it back up pretty quickly.
My friend Frank Healy, bass player and former bass player for many bands, Cerebral Fix and Benediction to name a few, [I knew] from way back in the days, knocking about the pubs and clubs in Birmingham in the late 80s. We always had the night come to the same conclusion, the same drunken conversation of, “Ah I wanna be in a band. We should start a band.” This was an opportunity to fulfill that kind of lifetime drunken rambling to get Frank and Whale together and form the basis of a new band. We got Scott Fairfax [guitars] because he knew Frank and got along well with him. He played in South America with Benediction as a standing guitarist when one of the guitarists couldn’t do it so we invited him to join us.
This was around 2015, around Christmas, when we had our first inaugural meetup in the pub to see if we all relate to each other and discuss what we were going to do. That was great. We thought we were gonna have a fun little band, gonna have some laughs, gonna go to the rehearsal room every Friday, get pissed, have some fun, maybe play some punk rock or death metal covers, and just have a blast. We set all that up and we walked up to our first rehearsal, which was just after Christmas at the start of 2016, and that’s when it all went horribly wrong because that’s when Scott said, “Well, actually, I’ve got these riffs…” the immortal words, “I’ve got these riffs.” He played us those riffs and the whole concept of doing a nice little covers band and just playing gigs in the local pubs and getting pissed up every Friday disappeared. There was this catalogue of riffs that Scott had stored away over the past 10 or 15 years that we took and formulated 11 songs and wrote new material. Because of heritage, who we are, we got signed quite easily and the rest is history. It’s been great. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster with changes but that’s life. We’ve achieved a Hell of a lot in quite a condensed space of time so we are proud and pleased with what we’ve done with Memoriam.
What makes you guys work so well together as a group?
Karl: There’s a chemistry there. I think it’s a long-term friendship. Obviously Whale is no longer in the band but he was there for the first three albums and getting us established. With Frank, I’ve known him for 30 years or so and it’s those long-standing friendships and the chemistry. You get to know people quite well over long periods of time and you get to know their foibles and their little characteristics. They can piss you off massively, and they do, and you can do it back to them as well but you get away with it because your relationship has stood the test of time. So I definitely think it’s chemistry that’s the key.
Your first question was what it was like to create [Memoriam] and we very easily could have gone down the road of being Bolt Thrower Mark Two, churning out Bolt Thrower sounding songs. I’ve got the Bolt Thrower voice, he’s got the Bolt Thrower drums, we could have replicated the guitars and gotten two guitar players in and very easily gone down that kind of Bolt Thrower tribute band route. We really, really didn’t want to do that. It was difficult when we first started out because that’s what everybody wanted, that’s what everyone wanted us to do, and that’s really, really what we didn’t want to do so it was a bit of a battle. We obviously sound too much like Bolt Thrower for some people and not enough like them for some people. It was a question of us not being able to keep anyone happy so we just made ourselves happy and did what we wanted to do on our own terms, which works really well, and I think that adversity and us against the world really worked and helped to form that bond for what we do.
One of the things is that we are a four-piece and the dynamics of what we do are very different from the band I was in previously. I think we did that intentionally and on purpose to create something that is death metal, it’s obviously still death metal, it’s got the elements of what we did previously in it because that’s me, my voice can’t be changed, but it’s intrinsically different. It’s got an old school death metal feel, the joy of doing it, and it’s definitely got the fast-paced approach. It’s something we’ve really wanted to recreate, what it was like back when we first started out, because that’s what we did. You didn’t really think about it. You were just busy creating music and putting it out every six months, every year. As the band develops, that initial fire starts to go out a bit and get lost a bit and then it’s two or three years between albums, or five or ten, so we strived to recreate that feeling of what it was like when we were first starting out and I think we’ve done that quite successfully and that’s what kept us driving. That and, we call it the million dollar riff vault, which Scott has got. He doesn’t really sit around and watch telly. He’s got this catalogue of riffs to choose from, so many that it’s quite hard to sort through them sometimes, for inspiration or music to use for Memoriam or any other project we might be doing at the same time so that helps as well.
What is the writing process like for Memoriam, both for the music and lyrics, and has that changed at all as time has gone on?
Karl: Not really. Scott’s the prolific songwriter so he spends every night in his studio writing music, then he fires it off to us on Dropbox. We have a listen to it and that’s when I put the lyrics to it, when it fires ideas in my head or timing structures quite clearly, and then I’ll go around to the studio and get some rough timings down, not the end product, but some rough timing structure to see if it works or not. Then we’ll polish it up and that seems to work for us really, really well.
Before, in the past with writing music, I never really had the opportunity to demo lyrics before we got to the studio so it was always there, in the studio, where they got delivered and where you found out if they work or not. Now this way, the way we do it now, I get the opportunity to see whether what I’m thinking works or not. Sometimes I think I’ve got the voice of Rob Halford or something and I’ll try it in the studio and it’s just not gonna happen [laughs]. So it’s nice to test that before we go and spend lots of money at a proper studio. It also gives me the chance to think about it. I’ll listen to it a few times and think of parts that can be done in different ways. That is the formula, that is the method, that is the madness that works for us.
How do you come up with the subjects for your material? You do a nice job in Memoriam of touching on a lot of themes, particularly current events and social issues, without ever feeling preachy about it. How much of a challenge is that?
Karl: I do get accused of being preachy about it quite a lot, but that’s fine [laughs]. Yeah, for me, it’s great. Memoriam is a great platform for me to kind of vent or explore different things that I hadn’t been able to do previously. The band I was in previously had a very strict or tight [structure of] songs about war. They were from different perspectives, and the psychological aspect of it, but predominantly all the songs were about war. Now, obviously, with Memoriam we are carrying on that thematic, which is important. However, I have the opportunity to explore other areas that are really important to me, such as social and political content, which I never really…it was there but I hid it [laughs]. It’s all down to interpretation, the lyrics, at the end of the day and you can read into it whatever you want. Once you’ve written it, the power is with the audience and they can interpret it a variety of different ways, some of which are abhorrent and which suprise me but it is what it is. It brings meaning to different people in different ways according to their life.
But yeah, I very much have taken the opportunity with Memoriam to stand on my soapbox and pontificate about social issues that I think are important to talk about. I think as a musician, as a vocalist, as a frontman, it’s my prerogative to do that. It gives it meaning for me, especially at this point in my life, to be able to get up there and say something about what I think is right or what I think is wrong with the world in which we live. Of course I’m gonna get some flak for it, which is good. I quite like that. I quite like to stir it up a bit and cause some controversy. Why not? Let’s piss off some rightwing Nazis, I’m all for that!
Does that keep it fresher for you to have more lyrical freedom with Memoriam and not kinda be stuck in one box?
Karl: Yeah it is great because it does get a bit restrictive after a while and a bit monotonous. It gets a bit boring to do the same thing over and over again for 10 or 20 years. I’m not detracting from what I did because it was great, but it almost feels freer to have an open textbook or a blank canvas to write about things. Sometimes it’s difficult to get my headspace into that place. You have to be in a certain state of mind to do that with everyday life. I’ve got two young kids, a job, all these different things that are going on so sometimes trying to find that headspace to write lyrics is a difficult thing to do. Sometimes it comes out of the blue completely. Maybe I’m watching something on the news and I hear something or I hear the presenter say a line which triggers something off. Sometimes it’s listening to the music that Scott fires over. I’ll listen to that and it kind of gives a structure that I’ll work the lyrics out around. Sometimes it comes from reading books, which I don’t really read as many books as I used to, not with having two young kids, it’s bloody impossible.
I do kind of think there’s three strands to the music I write, really. One is war lyrics; that’s always gonna be there. There’s always gonna be songs about war on the albums; that’s what we do. I don’t wanna piss people off too much by not doing it [laughs]. That’s our bread and butter. Then there’s obviously what we talked about, the social and political. There’s also a large element of songs that are about just life, getting old, and experience and that journey through life that we all go through and experience. I don’t think I could have written about that 30 years ago when I hadn’t had 50-odd years of life experience behind me. I think that comes from knowledge and from confidence in yourself, which I didn’t have 20 or 30 years ago. So those are three avenues that I generally tend to pick and choose from. Once I realize I’ve got two or three songs on the album that are political or social content, three or four songs about war, I’ll write some songs about getting old. That’s generally how I structure an album around those lyrical themes.
You mentioned a little about the pushback you get from your lyrics at times. How much of that do you get from people? You seem like you’ve got the old punk mentality where if you’re pissing off the Nazis, you’re doing something right.
Karl: Absolutely. I think I wouldn’t have had the courage or the balls to overtly write lyrics like this a long time ago. Maybe my ego wouldn’t have taken the knocks off people. At this point in my life, I’m not really out to please anyone else other than myself, really. I don’t really care what other people think about me and what I do. Generally, I’m kinda OK [laughs]. If they’re not happy with what I’m saying, that’s their problem, not mine. That’s the way I view life, really. I live by the law that if you don’t like something, don’t say anything about it and move on unless it’s something that really needs something said about.
The rampant rise of nationalism across the globe is a frightening phenomenon and developing in strength as we speak. You’ve got France veering toward a rightwing government; you’ve got the whole rise of the right. It all seems to be a kind of reaction to politics, to globalism, to immigration, and things like that. Multiculturalism is something that I grew up with in England and [something] I’m quite proud of. It makes a country what it is. If we were all the same, what a dull place to live. I think different cultures make something special in countries and there seems to be a backlash against that and it’s on a global level. Any kind of extremism…you see what’s happening in Israel, all the stuff going on in Ukraine, the rampant rise of Russian imperialism…it’s almost getting to the next scale. I feel it’s important for me to make comments on issues such as that.
Yeah, I will get abused online by racists and nationalists and rightwing republicans or whatever you want to call yourselves, pricks, but that’s fine. If I can piss off a racist per day, then I’m doing my job as far as I’m concerned [laughs]. I’ll carry on doing it, it’s not gonna stop me.
It’s like the punk rock version of an apple a day keeps the doctor away.
Karl: Absolutely. That’s where my ideology stems from, back in the old crust punk days [with bands like] Crass, Antisect, Amebix, all those kinds of bands. That’s where it comes from. That’s where my head is and it always will be there. That’s my ideology.
I love Crass. They’re a big favorite of mine as well.
Karl: They were killer live. I used to see them quite regularly in Birmingham at the Digbeth Civic Hall. That was great and of course there was The Mermaid where the second wave [bands like] Discharge, Amebix, and things like that [played]. All those bands used to pass through there so that’s where I lived every weekend. That’s were the initial bonds of friendship that are still there today thirty or forty years down the line [formed].
You touched on this a little bit earlier but Memoriam really has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time. What’s fueling that creative fire for the band and keeping you guys going so strongly and consistently?
Karl: We’ve slowed down a little bit, which is good for our own good, but when we started out we had fire, we had a point to make, we had a fury. We intentionally set out to try and release an album a year. We soon learned that you can’t do that but we did for the first two or three years. We managed to achieve that quite successfully purely driven by our own bloody mindedness and thinking about not thinking too much about what we do. Record it, put it out, document it, and move on. We couldn’t have done it if we didn’t have the million dollar riff bank, purely down to the creative drive of Scott Fairfax at the end of the day. He’s the one that has driven the music side of what we do.
COVID made us step back a bit. Our process was delayed by COVID because we couldn’t see each other to write the music and get to the studio and things like that. That kind of gave us an 18-month gap between the records as opposed to a 12-month gap and that kind of worked well for the last two albums. It gave us an extra six months to tidy up things a little bit more and think things through and change things around a little bit for the better. Obviously, the introduction of Spike T. Smith on drums is an impact as well on the last two albums. But we’ve done five albums and it’s going well and that 18-month cycle is working really well for us.
There is a bit of a larger gap between the last album and the next album, which is album number six, the last album of the second trilogy of albums. It’s written. It’s all done. It needs tidying up and it needs me to write the lyrics to it, because I haven’t started doing that yet, but it’s all ready to roll. We’re not really in any rush for that because what we are doing is waiting for Russ Russell at Parlour Studios. He’s the producer, he’s our engineer, he’s the master who’s been involved with all our albums, apart from the first one. That’s where the magic happens. He’s not really well at the moment, he’s recovering from cancer, so we are waiting for him to get himself better and once he’s back on track, we’ll go and record album number six, hopefully toward the end of this year. Then we will take it from there and see where we are at after album six and what we decide to do then.
I wanted to ask about that last album, Rise to Power. What was the creative process like for that one?
Karl: Great. Again, it was one of those ones where we really knew what we were doing. With the first three albums, it was fast paced and we were trying things out. Some things worked, some things didn’t work. I think by album number three, we knew what we were doing. We were on track and we knew what we were trying to achieve. Then we got a new drummer in and that kind of pushed us on to the next level so album four, To the End, was a great [experience] and album number five, Rise to Power, is a step forward even from that. Again, with having the 18 months to write it and test the demos out, from my perspective, it felt stronger.
There was a lot going on in the world when it was being written, the Ukraine war and things like that, which really helped me to form a really solid bank of lyrics. That really helps me. It helped me to write the lyrics to that song, which I’ve been trying to write for the past two decades, about the Holocaust [“Never Forget, Never Again (6 Million Dead)”], which I could never write. That was a very difficult song, very emotive. It was hard to write lyrics that give the subject matter the gravity and justice that it deserves but, again, it came from watching a lot of documentaries and reading some books and articles. A lot of lyrics came from firsthand experiences and quotes that they said about the experiences so it came together quite easily once we got going, actually. The [album as a whole] came together quite quickly. It’s almost as if we know what we are doing [laughs].
I thought the vocal performance on that one was killer as always. You’ve been doing such a harsh style of vocals for years. How’ve you managed to keep your voice healthy all this time?
Karl: Gigwise, it’s not a big deal. We are not a band that’s ever going to go on tour. We are weekend warriors and that suits us fine. I don’t want to jump on a tour bus and drive around Europe for two months. A.) I couldn’t do it because I’ve got a job, couldn’t get the months off. B.) I’ve got two young kids and I don’t want to leave them home and my misses would kill me for doing it. C.) I’ve done it all before and it was great. At this point in my life, I don’t particularly want to play the ass end of Europe on a Tuesday night for 35 people. I’ve done it, don’t need to do it again. I prefer to go for the glory. People my age tend to do the same and really only go out on weekends these days so Friday, Saturday, Sundays, and maybe Thursdays, are really the only days that gigs work for us. We fly in, we fly out. I get to jump up and down on stage and show off for 45 minutes to an hour. There’s no hassle there with your vocals because you don’t have to do it night after night.
However, when you are in the studio, it’s a little bit different because you’ve got to do 10 songs, minimum with bonus tracks, so it’s a question of not wearing it out or not burning it out too quickly, and pacing it and trying to fit it in around the other instruments. I tend to do three or four vocal tracks and then leave it for a couple days. Then they’ll go put some guitars in or whatever and then I’ll go back in and build it that way so that [my voice] retains its strength. I can always tell when it’s optimum and when it’s about to stop. When you feel it’s about to stop, you’ve gotta stop or you’re fucked for about a week. It’s a question of knowing your own boundaries and I think you do that as you get older. You get to know yourself, you get to know your boundaries, you get to know the warnings your body gives you to stop now and come back and do it later on. That’s what we do and it seems to work for me. That’s how we’ll do it next time and we’re looking forward to it.
I thought the track sequencing on that album was really natural and flowed better than most albums tend to these days. Did you guys pay special attention to the sequencing to make it feel like one cohesive whole rather than just a collection of songs?
Karl: In a way, the trilogies that we are writing, have a story that threads through them so we did try and maintain the balance and the story on each album as well. We are one of those bands that always think about vinyl. There’s a limited amount of time you can have on each side of vinyl so that’s one kind of thing that balances it. We know you can have “X” amount of minutes on this side and “X” amount of minutes on that side. You have to think about what fits where, what’s going to be an opener, what’s going to be the closing [track]. To be brutally honest, you don’t really think that something is going to be a killer opening track when you’re writing it. That’s something special that’s come out of it in the recording process, which makes a track stand out more as the opening or closing track to an album. A lot of the songs find their own place within the flow of it. It’s just a question of getting that flow right. I think the more you do it, the more you get that intrinsic feel.
Having someone like Russ Russell does help as well because he helps guide us. It’s a collaborative effort. As a collaborative effort, we structure the albums so that the flow is good and I think, on the last two albums, that flow is improving and we’ll maintain that by using the same setup as we always use. That’s why we are waiting for Russ. We are not in any rush and will continue to use the same things.
We’ll use Dan Seagrave as well. He’s quite the busy man as well, artistically, so it takes quite a while to schedule him into the process as well. I think [the collaborative process] works well…it being potentially our last album, who knows? We don’t know what’s going on. It’s the last album we’re contracted to do with Reaper [Entertainment] so once that’s done we’ll make some decisions as to what we want to do moving forward.
What’s it like to work with Dan Seagrave? He’s such a master and a legend for good reason.
Karl: He’s been intrinsic to us. For me, the music is obviously really important but also, artisticwise, visualwise…what I did in the past was based very much on imagery so I’m really aware of the importance of having a great looking album cover. There’ve been bands that put out great album covers that haven’t had such great music and vice versa but I’m not going to say anything bad about anyone [laughs]. Positive vibes only!
So yeah, having Dan involved from the start was really one of those things that, on the very first meeting we had when we met in the pub, we all sat down and said “well, what would you like to achieve in a perfect world, bucket list type things.” Scott’s thing that he said he wants in his life is to record an album and release an album with Dan Seagrave doing the cover. Because Dan Seagrave had worked with Benediction in the past, with Frank, and Frank knew him quite well, we asked if he’d be interested in doing our first album. We gave him ideas and visuals of what we were anticipating to see, kind of like a coffin being carried across a devastated landscape, which fits into his visuals quite nicely. He agreed to do it and we haven’t looked back since. Russ Russell is the silent fifth member of the band and Dan Seagrave is the sixth member of the band as well. His artwork is intrinsic to what we do. I don’t think there will be a Memoriam album without Dan Seagrave, to be honest. We are creatures of habit and we like to use the same things. That’s one thing I’ve learned from the past. If you’ve got a formula that works, don’t fuck with it [laughs].
What’s the creation process for the covers like? Do you give him a lot of direction or themes?
Karl: It’s incredible, really incredible, to be a part of his little world and be involved with the actual process because he does involve you in the development of the artwork side of things. It’s great to send an initial email and say “Yeah, Dan we want to work with you on this album, the title is going to be called “X,” here’s some prospective song titles, here’s some of the lyrics written to get a rough idea of what we are doing. What we’d like is an orange album theme of orange and we’d like to see, maybe, an orange man with white hair being burnt alive, or something along those lines.” Then he’ll go away and come up with different drafts of this orange man with white hair being burnt alive and he’ll come back with six or seven different versions from different angles. We get to say that we like this bit and that bit and get to see it evolve and develop over a period of about six months from these rough sketches to these watercolor outlines to the final, final oil painting in glorious detail with the intricacies he comes up with. Just to see these crazy, rough ideas you have in your head transposed to that kind of visual imagery is just an amazing experience. It’s brilliant to be part of that. In a nutshell, Dan Seagrave has to do our next album cover or we’re not doing it [laughs]. If he gets to see this, you better get in touch with me soon!
I have always been blown away by people who can do that. I have no artistic ability whatsoever so seeing someone able to do those detailed covers always feels a little like magic to me.
Karl: It’s mad. Say we want a dead dog in it, or a cat in it, he’ll get it there and only probably we can see it unless you’re looking really close and going “what the fuck’s that?” He’ll put in his comical little things that you ask him to do, within reason obviously and within his artistic integrity. It’s really an incredible process to see him doing his work. He’s a master at what he does.
I wanted to ask about a few tracks on Rise to Power and their inspiration, particularly that opener “Never Forget, Never Again (6 Million Dead).” You said you’d been trying to write that one for 20 years. How did that one come about in its final form?
Karl: It’s one of those things that I’ve tried on many occasions in the past, with my other band as well, to write something that didn’t really fit in with the general ethos or that stood out. With Memoriam, I’ve now got this open book where I can write songs about lots of other things. It fits in with the thematics of what I’m doing.
It just happened purely from listening. It was a riff but there’s a quite sad drum breakdown in it that got the “Men, women, and children, they number six million” section. That bit there it all evolved from. I got that kind of hook and thought that that worked really well and I built the rest of it from quotes from people that were there. I watched a few documentaries which were really quite disturbing and it all built from there.
Once I’d written it, it was probably one of the songs I’m most proud of writing. A.) Because it took so long to do and B.) Because it’s such an emotive subject and C.) The lyrics I’ve written out do give it justice. There’s nothing glorifying; it’s quite matter-of-fact. The fact that it’s taken a good burden off my shoulders to actually get the song I’ve been trying to do for 10 or 20 years and actually achieve doing it, it’s my bucket list! It’s one of the things you think you’ll never get around to doing or achieving because it’s so difficult to do but it’s done. I’m very pleased with it.
I particularly liked the line “The perpetrators of the final solution, those that instigate and those that looked away, guilty of genocide on an industrial scale” because it holds both the people that did it and the people that let it happen accountable. I think that’s a very relevant message for today.
Karl: Absolutely. That was the key to it, the fact that it very easily could happen again. It’s a question of people not forgetting about it and keeping the knowledge about it alive. As the survivors get older and pass away, that knowledge needs to be retained and passed onto future generations. If that little song helps to do that with people, that’s a good thing.
How about “I Am the Enemy.” How did you come up with that one?
Karl: That one was very much a kind of doomy kind of almost Paradise Lost feel to it when I heard it. On each album, since …For Victory, I’ve used bits taken from a poem called “For the Fallen”by Laurence Binyon. That very important poem I use a couple of lines or a verse from that poem on every album and have done since […For Victory]. So every album, there’ll be a bit of this poem. The first part [of “I Am the Enemy”], “They went with songs to the battle. They were young, straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow,” that is taken directly from that poem as well. To hook that bit in to the start of it I maintained my flow over the last eight albums or so, which satisfied me on that level but it also fit in really well with the start of it. The opening track, “I Am the Enemy” which is really different from what we normally do, and the last track as well, “This Pain,” those are my three favorite tracks on the album.
I actually wanted to ask about that closer so how did you come up with “This Pain?” I really dug the intro and outro there too.
Karl: You could probably link the first song into social and political content, “I Am the Enemy” you could loosely put into my war-inspired lyrics, and then “This Pain” is definitely one that you can lump into my getting old and experiencing life thematic. That song is taken from life and going through experiences, breakups of relationships that we all go through, losing people we love and know. It’s just drawing on all those feelings of sadness that you experience, knowing that they’re not going to last forever and you move on and you find new ways of developing and life moves on. That’s really the main theme to that song: life moves on. It’s painful and it hurts now but it will pass. It will pass.
I like that you include personal themes and lyrics like that on your albums. There’s some of it in extreme metal, but not a ton, so having songs in your favorite genre that relate to actual things you’re going through and experiencing is really nice and kind of comforting, particularly as I get to the age where I’m going through losing people and seeing family members struggle with health issues.
Karl: I’m not under the influence that our kind of music is big amongst the people that watch Tik-Tok or the younger [crowd]. Our fanbase is pretty much people who grew up listening to our music so we’re all getting to that point in our lives where we experience shit and go through heartbreak, misery, and pain. So a lot of people can actually associate with what I’m saying. Also, the fact that I’m the kind of vocalist who does try quite hard to make lyrics that I write vocally clear. I do try and it’s death metal so there’s an element of [guttural] “Aargh” but I do try my hardest to make the diction and the lyrics audible and you can actually hear what I’m trying to say. I think that kind of hits home with people and they can relate to the kind of experiences I’m talking and singing about, rhythmically shouting about as I call it. That resonates with people, I think, as we get old, it resonates. We’ve all been there, we’ve all been through it.
The other song I wanted to ask about on that one was “All Is Lost.” How did you come up with that one?
Karl: I like that song a lot because it’s really easy, lyrically. I’ve written a song that I cannot forget the lyrics to when we play it live, which is great [laughs]. It was the first time that we’ve actually done a scripted video which involved actors. We’ve always done the lyric videos, you gotta have them. Find some old footage of war, put the lyrics over them. It’s always worked in the past and been fine. It was really nice and creative, and expensive, to get involved with a director who knows what he’s doing, with cameras, in a studio and on-site, burning things. It was my first time ever doing it. Never done it before! To be able to experience these new things and do new things with the band, it’s brilliant. We had a great time and we’ve got ideas for [videos for] the next album as well. We’ll probably use the same actor, the evil bishop, will be in it again in a different guise.
The song itself is a bit different. It’s almost got a bit of a…almost…got a bit of a black metal feel to it in one of the sections, which is weird because I can’t stand black metal. It kind of works within that song quite well. I’m quite pleased with how the lyrics came out. You may have noticed I am quite influenced by a band called [Karl stands up and shows off a pretty sweet Killing Joke shirt]. I do have a bit of [Jaz] Coleman moments throughout my delivery of songs, intentionally and unintentionally; it’s just something that happens. That’s what inspires me. Them and Sacrilege are my two favorite bands in the world, ever.
Between writing the song you’ve been working on for decades and finally getting to do a real deal music video, that was a big album for crossing items off the bucket list. Any other goals or longtime dreams you’re shooting for now?
Karl: No, I think we’ve fulfilled it all. The next album’s gonna be really boring [laughs]. Ballads. Ballads and love songs. And songs about animals and cats. Who knows where my mind will ebb and flow to. Obviously it’s gonna be influenced by the same things that influenced me previously because those things still exist and are still happening so yeah, we’ll see where it takes us. I’m looking forward to doing it.
How up-to-date do you stay on what’s happening in the world of extreme metal? What are your listening habits like these days?
Karl: If I am to be brutally honest, I’m an old school punk rocker. My headspace only has space for the things I know and love, which is limited. I am a creature of habit. I’ll try and listen to some new stuff but, without sounding horrible or negative, a lot of the time when I hear something new I think, that’s good but I’ve heard it done better by “X” or so-and-so ten years ago. That’s where the problem lies. Occasionally, I do hear something good and I like it. When I like something, I like it a lot. I like the new Ten Ton Slug album [Colossal Oppressor]. I did some vocals on that, that’s something special. That’s quite good. I do quite like Highland as well, believe it or not. A bit of neo-folk. I think it’s the theatrical element of what they do that I quite like. But for me, I just listen to Killing Joke on repeat.
Can’t go wrong with Killing Joke.
Karl: That’s all I need in my life. Occasionally a bit of Sacrilege or Antisect or something like that but very rarely. I don’t tend to listen to a lot of music, apart from my own. That sounds really bad but it’s not out of choice, I just need to learn the lyrics. So I don’t really get any space, especially with two young kids and working…my time and space is very, very limited and often linked to rehearsing, learning new songs, or rehearsing to gigs so it’s pretty much just listening to Memoriam. I’m sure there’s lots of really, really good bands out there, I’m just not that interested. It sounds bad but it’s true [laughs].
For you, having been in extreme metal for decades, you’ve seen no shortage of changes to the genre and to the music industry in general. How much different is it now and what kind of state do you think extreme metal is in?
Karl: I think it works two ways, like a double-edged sword. It’s great in respect that it’s helped keep the music alive, specifically death metal, which was on its ass and forgotten about many years ago. The fact that the internet and all this from social media platforms and fans sharing their experiences about it…it’s almost like tape trading back in the day. That’s what it was all about and that’s how you found something that was special, that was yours, that belonged to you. Only a small group of people knew about it, a small niche, and when it grew, it got special because you were part of it. That’s where my love and passion for music came from, those tape trading days, pulling up to gigs and sharing or getting a random tape from some godforsaken hole in Chile that someone’s posted to you and you think, what’s this? This is great! And then sending him a tape. That and magazines [was how it was done] before social media, before there were computers. There was a whole world before computers! People used to write letters to each other with pens and everything! But now the internet is here and we deal with it. It’s great and it’s kept it alive. It’s meant that there’s a global platform and a big space for everyone. There’s so many different genres and subgenres within metal. You don’t have to like them all, or any of them. You can just like one or two or whatever but that’s what keeps it alive, that constant churn of different genres pushing out different bands on a global basis.
On the other hand, because of the volume, I think it’s quite hard to get heard these days. I think it’s quite hard for a band that’s just starting out to rise above all the noise. Memoriam, we were lucky because we had some heritage involved from what we did 20 or 30 years ago so we were already kind of halfway up the ladder before we started. I think for bands starting out it is quite difficult. You’ve gotta do something different and, mainly, you gotta be lucky. That’s the key. I think we’re at a point now where we’re at a place where there’s room within the scene for all sorts of different genres and that’s a healthy place to be. That’s what’s kept metal alive, its evolution and the space for everyone.
Photo at top: Rise to Power album cover (Artist, Dan Seagrave, discussed above in the interview).
Check out Memoriam’s website here. Follow the band on Bandcamp, Instagram, Facebook, and Spotify.