Demiser arrived on the scene in style this year with their full-length debut, Through the Gate Eternal. Combining all the aggression and speed of black-thrash with heavy metal melodies, Demiser take the best of both worlds for an album that is both memorable and evil.
Decibel caught up with the band’s bassist/vocalist, Demiser the Demiser, to talk influences, touring and being trve enough. Read the interview below and hear Through the Gate Eternal on Bandcamp.
The record’s been out for a while now. How are you feeling about it? It’s your first full-length and first thing most people have heard from you.
We’re pretty happy with it. Most of the reviews have been incredibly positive. A lot of the feedback we’re getting from random people have been very positive. The record’s been selling really well, the second press, the label’s almost sold out of the new color variants as well.
There’s a lot of variance in the record despite the black-thrash base. Was it a conscious effort to make the record a more diverse sound?
Everybody’s got a different background and what we’re influenced by. It’s encompassed in the same realm but we’re all borrowing from different places which kind of grounded the record out coming from the original vision to what it is now. It’s completely different but it’s so much better in a lot of ways.
You said you don’t want to paint yourself into a corner. Do you worry something isn’t trve enough or doesn’t fit the presentation enough? Are you concerned with fitting a certain image?
If somebody brings a riff to the table and we like it, we’ll find a way to incorporate it. Whether or not it’s got to remain trve kvlt, Blasphemy, it doesn’t really matter. We still ant to maintain that overall vibe of the music—that dirty, evil sleaziness—but as far as songwriting goes, I think originality and the attitude of the riffs, we can still pull that off regardless of how traditionally heavy metal our riffs may sound.
You’re based all around South Carolina. How does that influence your process of writing and recording?
Gravepisser, Infestor and Defiler are all located in Central SC. I’m up about two hours north and Phallomancer is about two hours south. We get together as an entire entity maybe twice a month. We make a weekend out of it and just go as hard as we can at it.
A lot of the writing recently, for the most part, a lot of piecing songs together and approaching the whole band with full songs is primarily Infestor, Gravepisser and Defiler. They work throughout the week at it and then when Phallomancer and I show up, they hit us with new song ideas and stuff and we make group decisions from there.
Do you think because of being spaced so far out from each other that COVID ended up not affecting you as detrimentally as other bands?
It really hasn’t slowed anything down for us. It made the recording process a bit slower, but aside from that, we’re probably a third of the way through writing the new album already. We haven’t slowed down at all in that sense.
You’re planning on getting out and touring in the fourth quarter of the year. Will you hold off on releasing the album you’re almost done writing until you’ve had some time to tour or are you just going full speed ahead with the next thing?
We’re giving it a little bit of time. A lot of times for us, you write a new song and it’s still got all these edges and pieces that haven’t quite settled in yet. Over a period of time, playing the songs live, everything finds its place in the song and really completes it. We could have a song 100% wrote and be playing it live and it might not be until that last week of the year where we play it and everything settles into its spot. From there, it stays.
I think we’re going to hold off for a little bit. We’re looking at a 2022 release.
This is your first album as a five piece.
Yes it is. The demo was just myself, Gravepisser and Infestor.
You went from a three piece to a five piece. You’ve been playing as a five piece for a while but was your writing process any different?
I think it was the same. Everything went pretty smooth. The demo was only three songs and there were only three of us, so the process was faster. We did it in Infestor’s house, in our practice space area. It was a pretty quick process.
More songs and we polished the songs up a little bit. They’re still dirty but we definitely added a lot to the two songs from the demo that we did keep for this record, especially lead-wise. Gravepisser added quite a bit compared to the demo versions.
