“Discarnate Ails is a bit of an oxymoron,” offers blacks arts pledge Jon Rosenthal in this month’s Decibel, Candlemass lit and loaded for Philly’s imminent Metal & Beer Fest. “How can such a young, non-legacy band have such a strong grasp on a style as pronounced as progressive death metal?”
Answer that immediately with a full-album preview of Haunter’s third long-player, streaming here exclusively before the disc’s release Friday via Profound Lore.
Last month, dB caught up in Austin with the blackened trio’s founder, Enrique Bonilla. At 8am, in front of the fourth largest university in the country, out of the mist strutted the Colombian guitarist like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. To quote Phil Lynott, lady killer on the loose.
Denim shirt and pants, and a bright white wife-beater popping his coffee-brown coloring and long black hair and beard, the Bogotá-born bandleader who founded Haunter in 2012 while at the University of Texas in San Antonio – the city his GM-hustling father finally settled the family after Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico City – bounced to his own rhythm as he cut a swath through early-morning student somnambulists. Ear-to-ear grin, jeweled accents, strong safety build, Bonilla cuts an obvious physical presence.
“I want to learn how to salsa dance,” he beams a few doors down at Zombie Taco, which posts up newly next to 40-year-old ATX live music institution the Hole in the Wall. “And two-stepping!”
Bonilla bursts out gleefully.
“Basically, I’m trying to learn how to dance this year, Raoul,” he laughs again. “I’m so bad at it, my mom’s embarrassed. She’s like, ‘You need to learn how to dance. I brought you [to the U.S.] way too young. You didn’t have any of your aunts and uncles here to teach you how to dance.’”
Discarnate Ails dances with death, all right: throaty, witchy, intricate.
“San Antonio has a great hardcore scene with hardcore bands,” reveals the former music officer and film commissioner for the Alamo City. “First time I heard something like Morbid Angel, I was like, ‘Yo, this is heavy, but it doesn’t have breakdowns. The vocals are screechier, production is heavier.’ The aesthetic of it was clearly way different than anything I’d delved into. Mayhem has that aesthetic, but it just opened a whole world of stuff. Some of the playing was way more technical. It just opened a lot of musical doors inside my head.”
So did the Decrepit Birth T-shirt worn by singer/guitarist Bradley Tiffin, longtime Haunter co-pilot. Equally veteran to the group, Mark Cruz bashes skins on Discarnate Ails but left the outfit to go play guitar. Steven Leyva takes over the drums alongside bassist Cole Tucker.
“So Discarnate Ails is made up of three songs: ‘Overgrown with the Moss,’ ‘Spiritual Illness,’ and ‘Chained at the Helm of the Eschaton,’” explains Bonilla. “They were all written between the fall of 2019 through late fall 2020, then we sat on them for a little while – worked on them together. Usually what happens is Brad will come up with a gigantic slab of riffs, pretty much already set to go. Then we’ll take it into practice and strip it away.
“That was one thing with this album: We wanted to make more of a metal album. [Predecessor] Sacramental Death Qualia has a lot of, like, Opeth acoustic passages, and this one’s a rocking album. Less thinking went into it. Not to say we didn’t put a lot of thinking into it, but it’s not as lofty. I like to say, it’s less arts and crafts and more locker room, more jock. We whittled away at it then went into the studio early last year.”
Profound Lore majordomo Chris Bruni approached Haunter in early 2020, but the pandemic intervened. Out of work and living on “those government checks,” Haunter spent its inaugural COVID-19 summer guzzling Mezcal all day, every day, and writing three dozen country songs for honky-tonk offshoot Calico Bonnet. Then Bonilla heard back from Bruni.
“I think I was drunk when it happened, honestly,” he chuckles. “We were hanging out at my house, or Cole’s house, early in the morning. I don’t think we’d gone to sleep. And I got the email. I was like, ‘Yo, he still wants to put it out!’
“It was a huge deal for all of us.”
Arthur Rizk produced Discarnate Ails, Dan Lowndes mastered. Now Haunter’s off to Europe.
“We want to play heavy music aggressively and go meet people, travel the world,” concludes Bonilla. “We don’t want to put ourselves in a box musically either. We’re in shoegaze bands. We’re in goth bands. We’re in a country band. We try to do it all.”
Discarnate Ails will see digital, CD, and cassette release Friday, May 6, with the vinyl to follow over the summer. Find pre-order options via Profound Lore HERE. And our Euro pals can catch them live on tour starting TODAY! Dates below.
