Following up arguably the greatest album of your career to date is a tall ask, but if you're not first you're last and really, every artist should feel their latest is their greatest right? Such is the case with California's thrash lords Warbringer, bursting back from their fan-favourite Woe to the Vanqusished in 2017 with Weapons of Tomorrow.
Combining layered, story-based songwriting with more than a few shades of grey to pull-from-the-pack of would be heirs to the throne of thrash, John Kevill, Adam Carroll, Carlos Cruz, Chase Becker and Chase Bryant made the three years between Woe and Weapons count.
Kevill caught up with Metal Injection during these pandemic days to talk layered, story based songwriting on Weapons of Tomorrow, being slapped with neo-thrash labels, his all time seminal metal record and always striving for a place on the wall of heroes!
On The Life of a Metal Musician during COVID-19
I mean, I have to ask myself, as a guy who spent over a decade doing this, why do I feel so strongly that I want to scream into a microphone as the majority of my life's work? I have to believe in it or else I'm crazy. I really think that the world and just being a moral being in the world, in modern society is often this kind of soul crushing experience. And I think with metal, just like the adrenaline, aggression and just raw energy unleashed by heavy metal or the musical genre is a great way to help you deal with that.
Basically, you gotta suck on a lot of unpleasant truths since the day you were born and none of us asked for it and none of us like it. That feeling of wanting to scream into a microphone in the first place comes out of all that.
On Breaking the Mold on New Album Weapons of Tomorrow
I kind of see us in like a 2.0 stage of the band. And to me I hope this is the one that becomes definitive. I think Woe to the Vanquished is our best record prior to the release of Weapons of Tomorrow, and I think Weapons of Tomorrow is as good or maybe a little better. So I'm really proud of that. And I do feel like this is, as far as what we've achieved as a band, the definitive era.
I have never, ever in my life wanted to be an homage to anything. I'll tell you that. I like 80s thrash metal. I like metal in general. I have a stricter and narrower definition of what that means then some people. I'm a bit of an old cross my arms and scowl guy. And I think there's reasons. It's not that I disparage you if you like something else, just don't call it metal. Metal means something very specific, and it's a wide realm, but it's a set of things. In addition to being inspired by 80s classic thrash metal, the stuff that you can expect; your Slayer, Megadeth, Kreator, Destruction, what have you, the first couple tiers of 80s thrash. We love all that for sure, but we don't want to be it. We are something different.
You can find a lot of elements of a lot of different bands, but you can't really find one zone and especially not from any of the more recent records, anything like album two. There's not any one song that's like any one band. We do try to have like several archetypes of our own song. We've never had the mindset of trying to pay tribute to something that already exists.
We have that stuff in our sights and we're trying to beat it, straight up. We're trying to write a better record, as good or better a record than the best one on your shelf. And it's not for us to decide if we succeed in that. That's for the fans, but that's the goal. And make no mistake, I think that's very important to have that as a goal. I didn't spend my life playing metal so I can make a homage to something. I want to make something that stands on its own.
On 'Neo-Thrash' and Genre-Placing
Genres aren't useless. But we got to understand them as a categorizational tool. They're not a hard and fast rule. And just because we generally are in the thrash metal genre doesn't mean we've never stepped outside of it. We have, and there's a bunch of examples. I don't mind neo-thrash, I don't mind new wave of thrash. You used to get like retro thrash and re-thrash a lot, which is a really dismissive attitude. And this is often towards like our first album and people would be bashing on our first album when I'm like 19, 20 years old writing these songs and I've never written a song before in my life, basically … that was our first album and we have continued to evolve since then. And I think that one of the things I see is that people who haven't listened carefully, especially to the last couple records, who aren't readily aware, will have a two sentence review of us, which is like 'neo-thrash band and I'm kind of into that or not.'
I've had this chip on my shoulder because I worked my ass off to make what I think are great songs. And that's been a steady, evolving journey my entire career, which is now over a decade. Calling us 'new' feels kind of silly to me, to be honest. We're on our sixth fucking record. If we were Metallica, we're on like Load now. I'll point out that we haven't done any such stylistic shifts and I think that there's a clear line of evolution you can draw between our first and our sixth record that shows continuous evolution, but also continuity.
I think we're just a thrash metal band and you might call us on the extreme metal end of it because we have a lot of early 90s death and black metal in there. And that's the stuff that straight up didn't exist in the original wave of thrash metal. So it's almost not an influence they could have had in the way that we do where we're able to retrospectively synthesize all that stuff. I think these terms are often an excuse for lazy journalism and a way to avoid actually addressing the songs and having to write about the songs on an individual level. And yeah, I do have resentment to that because I do feel like there's a large segment of the journalistic community that basically refuses to look at us as our own entity because they're so stuck on these categorizations.
On Storytelling Through Songwriting
I like to draw on themes I think are interesting and have a little depth. I've written six albums and I don't want to be writing lyrics like comic book violence like I was on the first album. Nothing wrong with it, that's just where I was. Here's where I am. And I like to have that storytelling component. There's stuff in here of substance and there's stuff in here to me that it's storytelling in such a way.
On track 'Heart of Darkness'
It's set in the Belgian Congo. That colonial era kind of little legacy of the civilization we're all living in right now was built on this… The book Heart of Darkness takes place in the Belgian Congo. And it is a brutal, evil and very racist book. Not for the faint of heart, but it's also very interesting because it's kind of like this colonial, imperialist, we're civilized and they're savages kind of perception, realizing it's evil from its own perception. And that's what I kind of see going on in that book. It's very interesting. It's like inflicted against itself. So I use that as kind of a talking point.
At the heart of all of this large scale human evil that you get is this question of if you could rule and dominate your fellow man, would you? I think that the ugly true answer is that for a lot of people, most people believe yes is the answer. Pain isn't pain if it's someone else's, and if you can draw a line between you and them that tells you they're not like me in X way or another, then you can justify inflicting that pain upon them and you will benefit. Free labor is great for the people getting the product for the labor. The song is about unpacking all that and dealing with the fact that that's the world we're standing on.
On track 'Notre Dame (King of Fools)'
Well, in this case, it seems we've done a two fer on the 19th century novel. And I haven't done that a shit-ton in the past, but I like to draw on real things. There's actually stuff to read into, on "Notre Dame (King of Fools)" though, because I kind of tried to split the difference between the Quasiomodo theme. Why write about Quasimodo? He's sort of a representative figure for personal isolation or rejection from the world. That feeling like I'm going to go climb into my tower by myself because everyone outside hates me and doesn't understand me. I think people feel like that in that I think everyone's felt like a Quasimodo in their life at some point when they differ from the herd that they're around in some way or another.
I think the first whole section of the song is very much within that realm. It's the crowd mocking the Quasimodo figure and then the Quasimodo figure retreating to the cathedral. But then after the soft instrumental break, like two thirds through the song, we get to a different perspective which is like the cathedral where all this stuff happened burns down. What happens to the story now? What happens to the legacy? So the song kind of lyrically pans from sort of first into third person by the end. So, yes, I always have a lot of shit to unpack in basically every song. And that's just the way I work and what makes it interesting for me as a writer.
On Evolving Music Taste
I'm a little wider in what I like. There was a phase when I started the band where if something was thrashy or from the 80s where I'd kind of inflate the rating I gave it. Now I'm kind of one of those people where honestly, a lot of my favorite stuff is completely unchanged from basically the day I started the band. My favorite thrash records are about the same. My favorite records are about the same ones, to tell you the truth. I went through this phase early in the band where I went in and just like devoured sort of the existing canon of metal and formed my opinions about it. And those opinions are more or less unchanged, to tell you the truth.
On His Defining Album
All of the what you could call the founding documents of Warbringer are still there. My official favorite album ever remains the same as it was in 2008, which is Bathory Twilight of the Gods. I really, really love that one. Like the song "To Enter Your Mountain" has this spiritual quality to it. It's very powerful. And I feel like everything else that they called Viking metal after Quorthon is like the plastic Viking hat to Quorthon's real helmet. One guy actually really nailed it and everyone else is playing Halloween off of that, you know?
On Band Evolution & Future
I feel great about it. I think Woe to the Vaniqueshed was our best release to date and I think we've got a great lineup and we're more stable than we've ever been and we're more established. We don't have to do the sticking our face to the grindstone all year long, which is why it was so tough for us to keep a lineup in the earlier period of the band. And I think we finally achieved the fundamental goal I had when we set out, which is to make the kind of record that you'd put on your wall. Those are the kind of records I love. I have my own list of those and they're still all there. I still have a great passion for all of them. And I want records that make other people feel like that.
On the last record in particular we started to get that kind of feedback where people would say, Rust in Peace and Woe to the Vanquished are my favorite ones, and I grew up on the former. Even just from some people to get that kind of comparrison at all, that to me is like achieving the goal I set out to do. In the simplest terms, I want to make really great heavy metal records. That alone is the essence of it.
We could talk about where the band is commercially, but at the end of the day that's not what matters. What matters is were our records fucking good? And I'm really proud to say that I think we've always tried our best, and I think that we've gotten to a point where I can answer that in my own head. Yes. I really think we've done a great job here. I think Vanquished was a step forward for the band. I think Weapons of Tomorrow successfully doesn't drop that ball and keeps it moving forward. And I think it solidifies us as our own entity. You don't have another band that's written these records or something like them. And that was my goal.
