For those who are late to the Boss Keloid party, listen up. Formed in 2009 by guitarist Paul Swarbrick and a few others, with vocalist Alex Hurst and drummer Ste Arands joining shortly after, the band started as some sort of weird mash-up of sludge, doom and math metal in the vein of Mastodon, with a spice of Clutch and one of Swarbrick’s principal influences, Keelhaul, thrown in.
“Keelhaul came into my arena and totally grabbed me [with their] muscular, complex, really sludgy riffs.,” Swarbrick recounts.
The band’s early output, comprised of the Angular Beef Lesson EP and The Calming Influence of Teeth, is heavy, raw and chock full of ideas. After all, Swarbrick started Boss Keloid at the ripe age of 30, and because he’d been playing guitar since age 10, “I had a lot of riffs and ideas – over 20 years’ worth – to get out of my system,” he said.
“[The Calming Influence of Teeth] was more about putting as many riffs ideas into a song as possible. You’ll have 30 riffs in one song and we said, ‘That’s not enough!’” Swarbrick continued. “Once we got it out of our system, we took a step back and really focused on the dynamics, on the melody.”
The result was Herb Your Enthusiasm, an album that almost sounded like a completely different band, but still retained some of the core Keloid elements. It was heavier in a different way than its predecessors – slower, sludgier and more brooding, to be sure – but it came to define a key philosophy of how Boss Keloid operates.
“We’ve never wanted to write the same thing twice,” Swarbrick said. “People grow in a certain way and evolve, and the music does that [too].”
That evolution has reached its pinnacle – at least for now – in the band’s fantastic new record, Melted on the Inch. The album dropped April 27, but the band also performed the album in full for a secret studio session at Alien Sound Studios in the UK, and Metal Injection is exclusively premiering a video of their performance of "Peykruve" from that session above.
This time around, Boss Keloid wasn’t afraid to really dig into their collective influences, throw them in a melting pot and see what came out on the other side.
“We tried to grasp everybody’s influences – musical influences, emotional influences, daily influences – and just really not be afraid to experiment and challenge each other,” Swarbrick explained. “The only thing we had in our minds was just to push ourselves to experiment as much as possible and open up as much as possible.”
The blossoming rainbow flower that adorns album’s abstract artwork is a representation of evolution, Swarbrick said, but that’s about as close as he’ll come to explaining what the album’s title and the seemingly gibberish song titles actually mean. The band intentionally left everything enigmatic so that listeners could interpret the album’s meaning themselves. It also plays into the charmingly oddball personalities that make up Boss Keloid.
“The album title could be about making the perfect cheese on toast,” Swarbrick said with a grin. “It’s a bit silly, but we don’t take ourselves seriously at all – the music’s the serious bit and that’s what we wanted people to focus on.”
The lyrics to the album aren’t so mysterious. Throughout Melted on the Inch, a thread of positivity is woven into the music, beginning with the opening track, “Chronosiam.” The lyrics to the song were written by Swarbrick and are complimented perfectly by his uplifting, mammoth riffs.
“It’s about being yourself and not being afraid to find your true self and your true heart, really,” he said.
It’s just one example of how Melted on the Inch brings the listener on a journey of musical highs and lows that ultimately leaves them feeling satisfied. Each song flows seamlessly from one part to the next, never feeling convoluted or pretentious in any way. Boss Keloid stands out in a sea of imitators, and it’s largely because they’re not afraid to be themselves. They’ve certainly grown as musicians over the past ten years, but they’ve also grown as humans, and as Swarbrick pointed out, with age comes more emotional intelligence – a characteristic that will inevitably spill over into the music any band with integrity writes.
“On this album, we wanted to create much more of an emotional journey,” he said. “To us, the songs are like individual journeys, the range of emotions in one song is quite vast. We just hope people will tap into that and engage with the emotions of the songs.”
“Peykruve” is perhaps the most emotionally heavy song on the album. It was written about fellow local musician to them and a friend of Hurst’s named Leon and how he dealt with a brain tumor that unfortunately took his life last year.
“He got on with life, he still played music, he still had a smile on his face and the words he spoke to Alex one day before he died was, ‘Positive thinking is the only medication you need,’” Swarbrick said. “That quote, those words he spoke to Alex, they’re actually in the lyrics to the song.”
Melted on the Inch also marks the band’s first for the up-and-coming UK label Holy Roar Records, which has been around for over 10 years but is beginning to gain more even more traction with a stacked roster and a steady stream of killer releases – Boss Keloid included.
“You can’t really pin down what the label is about, what type of music it looks for. It just embraces every type of music,” Swarbirck said of the label. “They’re really a hard-working label and I think they appreciate and understand hard-working bands, and I think that’s how we’ve come to work with them.”
After all’s said and done, hard-working is probably the best way to describe Boss Keloid. They’ve been at it for 10 years now, and though they may still be “underground,” they’re on their way to great things. Ultimately, they do what they do because they believe in it and because they love it – it’s what sustains the band and the music they create, and Swarbrick says that as long as the love for it remains, Boss Keloid will keep on keeping on. In fact, they’ve already got one song in the bag for the next album.
“If the passion’s there, we’ll just keep doing it and keep pushing out as far as we can – creating music and writing music.”
