Interview with death metal band from Germany - ACRID DEATH.
Answered Volker, Thomas and Tobi, thank you!
Recenze/review - ACRID DEATH - Abominable Presence of Blight (2024):
Ave ACRID DEATH! I haven’t found any interview in the Czech language with you, yet. So please, first introduce the band to our readers who don’t know you. You could start from the early beginnings and describe the whole ACRID DEATH history.
Hi man, this is Volker from Acrid Death! Glad to answer your questions!
So, there's not that much to tell yet actually, as we're a pretty new band! The members all have been making underground metal for decades, but we as a band only really started when the pandemic was over, I think spring 2022-ish.
Thomas, Tobias and I played at Driven by Entropy already and when Thomas said „man, I wanna do some old-school shit, like real nasty HM-2 stuff“ I said „sure, let's go!“ and went to work, writing some riffs, finding a sound and putting together the first couple songs. Then we started looking for a band and of course asked Tobi first who immediately said yes and brought along his All Its Grace buddy Christian. I then asked my buddy Philipp from Synchronic to play drums and here we are!
I’m just listening to your new record „Abominable Presence of Blight“ and I feel like as if I am closed in some tomb together with DISMEMBER, GRAVE, ENTRAILS, SORCERY, INTERMENT, CENTINEX. The record has a great Swedish sound. Where did you record it and how satisfied you are with it? Did you have the "last word" concerning the resulting sound?
Yeah, that's exactly what we were going for! Entrails, man, The Tomb Awaits is such a great album, love it! So yeah, it sounds exactly as we want it, recorded and mixed by Emil Cezanne of Nighttime Productions, who had just finished working on the latest All Its Grace record, and mastered by Brad Boatright of Audiosiege who has worked with amazing bands like Nails, Gatecreeper, Obituary and many more.
How was the new material for album „Abominable Presence of Blight“ created? How exactly ACRID DEATH writes the music?
Usually it starts with me recording some parts at home, sometimes whole songs. Then I bring that stuff to the rehearsal sessions with the guys and we start tweaking it, re-arranging, adding parts, removing parts etc., and when the general structure is set Tobi starts writing vocals.
„Abominable Presence of Blight“ has dark and morbid cover art. Who is an author? I really like his work. How did you actually choose the idea of the cover and what exactly illustrates?
I’m going to hand this one over to Thomas as he did pretty much all the work there, so Thomas, there you go:
The cover was created by an artist called Denis Cardan, who I got from Vladyslav from All4Bands. It was important to me that the cover wasn't just a cover, but a part of the album in itself. I'm afraid that people have unfortunately lost sight of that nowadays. The idea came from Denis, based on my specifications. At first I simply said: "Suffering people, wasted country!". With these words, I was handed the record Fathomless Mastery by Bloodbath in 2009, which is still my undisputed favorite record in death metal today.
In principle, the idea behind it is simple. We as humanity are (once again) in the process of opening the door to hell, be it through man-made climate change, recurring nationalism, brutal wars of aggression, unbelievably stupid populism, hatred, exploitation and oppression, etc., to name just a few things. All of this is represented by the beast, which comes out of this burning gate with its helpers. So these aspects are also mirrored in the album title „Abominable Presence Of Blight“
Of course our record will contribute to the destruction of the world...okay, just kidding.
Could you reveal us who is an author of the lyrics and what is their background? Where did you take inspiration for certain topics?
This one is for our vocalist, so there you go Tobi:
First of all, I am always happy when someone shows interest and asks about the lyrics. It doesn’t happen that often.
I write all of them and for most songs, I tried kind of a dual approach. I have a general topic I want to write about, which then needs to be “packaged” into something fitting for Death Metal songs and has an eerie or even threatening atmosphere. Like “Huntsmen” being about the hubris of parts of the human species, but is told by describing being hunted and devoured by something nasty like a giant spider.
Inspirations and topics can be very different. So, to give a few examples: On one hand there’s books like “House of Leaves” (Danielewski) which I just love in general or “Ship of Theseus” (Dorst, Abrams) that found its way into our song “Heave”. The song itself is about losing your directions in life and being horrified because your are being overwhelmed.
I also love video games and for example the title for “Dreg Heap” came from an area in Dark Souls III.
Then on the other hand there are songs about more specific topics. “Presence” is about a psychiatric phenomenon called fugue state and “Shadows” deals with changing mental states while facing a looming threat of complete psychological breakdowns. “Negative Space” tries to explore existential dread by using the vast emptiness and unknown horrors of space as a symbol.
And while I think it is inevitable to also have personal issues and experiences find their way into stuff you write, I mostly try to keep it a bit more vague in order to leave space for the individual interpretations of everyone who is interested to spend time and try to read and understand the lyrics.
Well, and of course I love reading the lyrics of other bands to get inspired. The list here would be endless and contain bands from Pig Destroyer to Radiohead and many things in between.
The new album was released by Rising Nemesis Records. This label has a very good name in the underground scene and does a very good job. However, didn't you want to release a record in some bigger label? Did you ask some other label? How you are actually satisfied with Rising Nemesis Records?
Nasar, who runs Rising Nemesis, is a buddy of Thomas, so he was the first guy we asked if he wanted to release the record and he said yes, so here we are! It's exactly the kind of label we need, small and agile, giving us the freedom to do our thing without any pressure, that's how we like it! I would subscribe to that (note from the interviewer).
You play typical, classical Swedish old school death metal. You have never changed the direction, you are let's say „orthodox“. Personally, this is one reason why I like your music so much. But, didn’t you think about try to play something different, somehow to make the ACRID DEATH music more unusual?
The whole idea behind Acrid Death was to do this exact thing. We all have other bands that make other, more modern kinds of music, but AD gives us the opportunity to go old-school, which is exactly what we wanted to do here.
It is obvious that you as a band are still working on yourself. How often do you rehearsal together? Are you a "hard-working" band, which practices regularly or are you more „punk“ in the rehearsal task?
Kinda in between. We're all experienced musicians so we don't need to rehearse every week, and we also all have full-time jobs and some of us have families so we have to be careful with our time, but usually we manage to do at least two sessions a month, sometimes more sometimes less.
Do you have some goal, which you would like to achieve? Someone wants to release an album with a large label; other wants to play on one stage with some famous band. What about you?
Life goal right now: Play PartySan in Germany or even better Brutal Assault in Czechia!
Can you recommend some new albums, which impressed you at the latest time?
Carnation – Cursed Mortality
Awseome HM-2 death metal, kinda like us but way better
Une Misère – Damned
Ultra-angry metalcore from Iceland, those guys were my discovery 2019 when I stumbled across them at Summer Breeze, and now they have a new EP out that's just absolutely insane!
Do you know and listen to some metal bands from the Czech Republic?
When we went to Prague for Thomas‘ 40th birthday in 2020, right before COVID, I went to Metal Bar Error and learned about Root, this ultra-nasty czech black metal band, Zjevení is still my go to song when I’m REALLY drunk!
We are slowly approaching the end of the interview so I would like to ask one more philosophical question. How would you define the Swedish death metal style? What represents this music for you and why did you choose exactly this genre?
So there's the obvious thing, the sound. That nasty HM-2 guitar tone is definitely a signature thing here. But it's also the fact that this type of death metal owes more to punk and hardcore than American death metal does, it's groovier, not as technical and amelodic and goes really well with beer. For me.
Stockholm style is more fun than „normal“ death metal, even though I absolutely adore stuff like Cannibal Corpse, Cryptopsy etc.
What ACRID DEATH is planning for the next few months?
Playing as many shows as we can, release some live videos and start writing the next record!
Thank you for the interview and I wish you a lot of sold CDs, hundreds of crazy fans and tons of great ideas.
Thank you for having us!
Recenze/review - ACRID DEATH - Abominable Presence of Blight (2024):
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