Few bands flying the flag of brutal death metal have been more consistent or more influential than Pathology. Formed in 2006 by Dave Astor, of The Locust and Cattle Decapitation fame, Pathology dropped their first LP, Surgically Hacked, that same year. Like any band, Pathology has been hit with changing lineups and a changing music industry over the past several decades but neither have slowed the guys down. If anything, the band has only grown stronger and more potent as it built a legacy, killer album after killer album.
Since 2018, Ricky Jackson has been manning the bass for Pathology. Jackson’s first LP with the band, 2019’s Reborn to Kill, quickly showed fans that the changeover from Oscar Ramirez would be a smooth and seamless one. This year’s Unholy Descent finds the band, and Jackson, continuing to fire on all cylinders as they again deliver another pummeling collection of brutal death metal insanity. I recently caught up with Jackson to chat about what it was like to join the institution known as Pathology as well as what went into making Unholy Descent.
First off, how did you end up joining Pathology? Had you been a fan beforehand and what was it like to get invited to join the band?
Ricky: Before Pathology, Dan [Richardson, guitars] and I had been close friends for a long time. We go way back to when we were both in other touring bands. After Dan joined Pathology, he reached out to me to see if I was interested in playing bass and I came to a practice and met Dave and we practiced a couple songs and it just went from there. It was very seamless and everything just clicked from the first time Dave, Dan, Obie [Flett, vocals], and I got together.
I was a Pathology fan way before I joined. Awaken [to the Suffering] and [The] Time [of Great Purification] are both awesome albums that I listened to. Being from San Diego as well, I’ve always loved our scene and especially the heavy bands that made it on the touring circuits, [with] Pathology being one of the few that came out of our city. I’ve also been a fan of Dave’s for a very long time, too. Cattle Decapitation was a pivotal band for me while I was growing up and was one of the bands that really got me into the genre. I saw Cattle a lot back in the early 2000s. It’s been great making music and playing shows with him.
Were you at all nervous to join such a long-running band? You and Dan joined about the same time, did it help to not be the only new guy on the block? How did you end up settling into life with Pathology?
Ricky: I wasn’t nervous to join the band at all, I was very excited to play with my friends and tour again. I started touring in 2011 with an Oakland deathcore band, Suffokate. Touring was a dream for me growing up and, from the very beginning of joining Suffokate, I absolutely loved touring. When the band dissolved, it was very difficult letting that band and professional touring go but I always had a deep down feeling that I would tour again. I felt like it was something I was meant to do and when Dan contacted me to join Pathology I was extremely excited to not only be joining the the band but being involved in the writing and being a part of the touring circuits again.
Dan is an extremely talented and experienced guitarist and with our friendship going back as long as it has, we just meshed effortlessly. I hadn’t met Dave yet, at that time, but all of our personalities and interests were aligned and we all instantaneously were best friends from the get-go. After the first couple practices it all fell into place.
What was the writing/recording process like for the first album you did with the band, Reborn to Kill? Looking back on it, how do you feel about your first LP with pathology?
Ricky: For the first album the writing process was very natural and just flowed. We were exploring all of our writing styles and worked on a lot of different ideas. It was all of our first time recording with Zach Ohren and it was a great experience, he is an incredible engineer. Listening back to that album now, there are a lot of great songs on that record and it’s really cool to see the growth with all of us with our current album.
In general, what’s the music writing process like for the band? Has it changed at all during your time with the group?
Ricky: For the last few records our recording process has pretty much stayed the same. We came up with a pretty good pre-production structure that works for us. We have a collaborative effort with the writing process. We all come up with ideas at home in our own personal studios and bring the riffs to Dave and then we record them at the practice studio. Certain riffs make the cut and others we will keep for either a possible revision riff, or for another song, or we will cut them all together. From there we come up with song structures and drum ideas are formed. We will revise our tentative entire song ideas a few times then reach a final pre-production product. Leads and solos will be placed on top and I’ll start working on finalizing the bass tracks. Once the pre-production songs are finalized, we send them over to Obie and he will start vocal pre-production and vocal patterning.
How about your second record with the group, The Everlasting Plague? Having had some touring and an album under your belt with the band, was making that one a different experience for you? How did the writing/recording of that one go? It’s one of my favorites from the group.
Ricky: The writing and creation of TEP was a different experience in a good way. We were all used to how each one of us wrote and created ideas and it was easier for us when it came to starting to write for it. For the last three records we have written the material the same way. All of us bring ideas to our band studio, recording ideas, filter out ideas that didn’t work and then forming the song structure and adding all the other elements. I’m glad you really liked that record. There were so many different directions musically in that record that we wanted to explore, and I feel we blended them so well underneath the death metal umbrella.
When did you guys start the writing/recording process for Unholy Descent? Did you guys want to continue what you’d done on The Everlasting Plague or did you want to try and go in different directions with it?
Ricky: We started writing for Unholy Descent in Jan of 2023. We really liked how TEP turned out and I think we wanted to continue in that direction of incorporating different musical styles in the songs but also adding some other elements. We wanted to incorporate a lot of heavier riffs and breakdowns into the songs while keeping the super death metal riffs and blasts and also melodic sections and solos. I think we accomplished what our vision was for the record.
What do you want listeners to get out of the record? When someone throws on Unholy
Descent, what do you want the listening experience to be like?
Ricky: We want listeners to grasp a multitude of styles on this record that we all enjoy. We all love slam and brutal death metal as well as more melodic approaches and other heavy genres. We just want to show appreciation for the scenes and for heavy music in general. Hopefully listeners can understand that in the music and also see growth of our style with our lineup from the previous two records. We want to create our own sound as a band too. We want people who listen to our music to know right away that it’s Pathology. I think it’s important for a band to have their own unique style and sound. I think we have created a noticeable sound that fans of a lot of metal genres will like and can appreciate.
I wanted to ask about a few tracks on there and get the musical/lyrical inspiration for those. How did you guys come up with “Cult of the Black Triangle?”
Ricky: Obie’s lyrical inspiration and ideas pull from horror films, to government conspiracies and extraterrestrial beings and cover-ups, to serial killers and much more. He brings a lot of different lyrical directions to every track. “Cult of The Black Triangle” started as a slam riff that Dan wrote, then the song formed around that. During pre-production we heard some orchestrated symphony-esque style melodies during an open chord section of the track. That idea turned into us adding more orchestrated sections into other songs. After we recorded the album, we thought that “Cult Of The Black Triangle” would be a great song to start the record.
How about “Psychotronic Abominations?”
Ricky: “Psychotronic” really stood out to us after we recorded the record. We knew it was going to be a song we would add to the setlist immediately and thought it would be a good song to do a music video for.
What about the story behind “Punishment Beyond Comprehension?”
Ricky: To be honest, I don’t really know the story behind “Punishment Beyond Comprehension.” We all really liked how it turned out. It’s a powerful song that I think stands out on the record.
“A World Turned to Ashes” was another favorite of mine. How did you guys come up with that one and was it always intended to be the closer?
Ricky: Many of the last albums have had an instrumental track on the record and when we were writing for Unholy Descent we originally wrote an instrumental track as well, which originally was going to be “A World Turned To Ashes.” But as we got close to finishing the pre-production we came to the decision to add vocals and it turned out great. The melodic flow at the end of the track seemed to work really well with the symphonic outro ideas we had and I think it blended really nicely.
The album has another totally killer cover from Pär Olofsson. How much direction do you guys give him at this point? I feel like he probably knows the band better than most anyone by now. How involved in the covers is the band and how stoked are you guys when the final image comes in?
Ricky: Par is a top notch artist and has really helped create the artistic image of the band. After Dave came up with the idea of using a doctor for the artwork on the first record, Pär has created a visual journey of the doctor that has become a major symbol of the band. We give him a general idea of what we are thinking art wise and let him use his vision for the art and every time it turns out better than we could have imagined. He gives us his own artistic ideas throughout the process and we formulate it together. The Unholy Descent album artwork came out exceptionally good. There are so many little details he added and the color schemes he used really pop.
I loved the music videos you did for “Cult of the Black Triangle” and “Psychotronic Abominations.” Where did you film those and what were the shoots like? By this point, do you still get nervous for music videos or is it pretty commonplace by now?
Ricky: Thanks man! We have been recording all of our music videos with a long time friend of the band and a guy that goes way back with Dave for a really long time, Jeff Forrest. Jeff has a really cool video and recording studio in San Diego and we did “Psychotronic” at his studio and shot “Cult” at a different location. I don’t think we all get nervous, it’s a really fun time shooting and getting different cuts for the video. With Obie living in Santa Barbara, it’s great to all get together and hang out outside of tours.
Have you guys gotten the chance to play the new material live yet and, if so, what has the response been? How hard is it to throw together a setlist at this point trying to balance classics and new tracks?
Ricky: We played several songs off the new album on our headliner last month. The reception for the new tracks was great and it was really cool introducing our fans to new music they haven’t heard for the first time in a live setting. I think it impacts differently hearing it on the new record then seeing it live. We tend to balance our setlist with a handful of classic songs that people know and love, then bring in some new material and other older ones that we think the fans will enjoy.
Lastly, what’s the plans for Pathology for the rest of 2024?
Ricky: Right now we are working out more touring plans and seeing what’s ahead for the rest of the year. We are working on going back to Europe and also wanting to do a full US tour and hit the East Coast and other areas we haven’t been able to reach on the last tours. Maybe reach out to some more international countries we haven’t been to yet. We want all of our fans in all areas to be able to see us and we are working on making that happen. Hopefully we will have some domestic and international announcements coming soon.
Photo at top: Unholy Descent album cover (as discussed above in the interview).
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