Rivers Of Nihil's new album Where Owls Know My Name was a pretty big hit in 2018. The record was a great blend of progressive death metal and jazzier, saxophone-heavy sections that caught the ear of quite a few listeners. Though in a new interview with Exclaim, guitarist Brody Uttley says whatever the follow-up to Where Owls Know My Name is won't be quite as saxy… and possibly a lot more dissonant.
"I don't want to say a noisier or more gritty release, but I guess that would probably be what we've discussed so far, since I feel like on this record people have kind of — 'Oh, the saxophone, that's the sax band,' or this or that. I feel like at this point people are kind of expecting us to just keep the ball rolling in that direction and go the way of like a Mastodon did, where after Crack the Skye they started having more and more songs with clean singing and got more of a mainstream kind of thing going on."
Vocalist Jake Dieffenbach adds that he feels like the amount of woodwinds and brass on the record made sense given the context.
"I think that the amount of sax that's on the record and the context of it, at least from my point of view, I think that we did it in a way where it's not like BOOM here's the sax part that we just threw into the song because we're going to get that sax cred. It was a super natural thing."
Rivers Of Nihil will play Where Owls Know My Name in full with a live saxophonist on their coming tour with Entheos, Conjurer and Wolf King.
