Psycroptic On Tour With Rivers Of Nihil Is On Now…

This week, Tasmania’s finest export, extreme metal pioneers, Psycroptic join like-minded-and-saxophone-wielding US progressive death wizards Rivers of Nihil for a co-headline tour that brings together two elite bands operating at the highest tier of modern death metal. For Psycroptic, the timing couldn’t be stronger. Off the back of relentless global touring alongside the likes of Dying Fetus, Ne Obliviscaris and Six Feet Under, the recently released singles, Architecture of Extinction and Falling, plus their ninth studio album set for a mid year release via Metal Blade Records, the band continue to prove why they remain Australia’s most respected technical metal export more than two decades in. Jason Peppiatt talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

Three years in the making, do you ever get to a point where you think, how much longer is this going to take? Can we actually get this over the line?
We’re not a band that’s on a two‑year turnaround. You get a lot of bands that tour for a year, take time off, write, record, and have it out, so there’s only two years between albums. We like to take our time with it a bit. For the eight to twelve months after an album release, we’ll tour hard, hit all over the world, because that’s a huge part of what we enjoy doing. Then we’ll just start slowly chipping away at an album. Whether it takes three years, four years, five years, whatever it is, we’re going to get there in the end. We don’t want to be rushing just to get something out there. It’s got to be right, and if we end up having to spend an extra six to twelve months on it, so be it. We’d rather labels get pissy about us than submit something and three months down the track be listening to it going, oh, it’s a piece of crap, why did we do it?

How does it start for you guys? Do you have a vision in mind sound‑wise, or does it start with jamming to get the creative flow going?
It’s very organic, really. The way we’ve done it for a long time now is Joe Haley, our guitarist, he’s a mastermind. Amazing guitarist, amazing writer, amazing composer, amazing producer. He’s the whole package. When inspiration strikes him, he’ll start writing and send us demos of pretty well‑formed songs. Our job is to build on top of what he sends us and complement what he’s doing with our parts. Everybody’s doing their own thing. Joe sends it out, we’re writing our own parts, then we go into the studio and record it. We do tweaks as we go, but the fact that Joe owns the studio and he’s an engineer gives us the opportunity to be writing and recording simultaneously. We can fully formulate ideas and know how it’s going to sound on an album. I’m not against the old‑school jam room style, but for us, we like to have the fully formed ideas while we’re working with it.

It must take a lot of pressure off having those ideas almost fully formed when you’re sitting in the studio?
Yeah and the fact that we’re not watching the clock ridiculously. If we were to hire a studio and an engineer, you’ve only got them for a certain amount of time, so you’ve just got to get shit done and delivered. With Joe, we just pay him to chip away in his spare time as well. Apart from the bulk chunk of it, he can keep chipping away at an album for as long as he needs. He can try some pretty outrageous shit or things you might not think would work, but because he’s got the studio and the know‑how, he can put crazy ideas down, send it to us — what do you think, does this work, does this not work? You’re not having to take a punt, so you don’t have that pressure. There’s a lot more freedom to muck around, experiment, and try different things.

Were there any challenges or roadblocks along the way?
For me personally, this was probably one of the harder albums to write. When Joe sent the demos out to Dave and I, we were both listening and working our parts to it. There was quite a lot where Dave was hearing things vastly different to how I was, where the grooves were, where the accents were. He goes in recording drums before I’m in recording vocals, and the patterns and grooves he came out with were quite different to what I was hearing. When it came to me working with it, some of the stuff I found quite hard to wrap my head around to begin with. I had to go into the studio with Joe and get him to run his eyes over it, have a bit of input, help me out. That was more challenging than usual, but we got there in the end. I’m lucky I get to work with such amazing musicians and producers with this whole thing.

How do you see the sound evolving between albums? Is there much subtle change with this album compared to the last one, or even the one before that?
Yeah, I think if you listen, and this is what I always say about Psycroptic, if you listen from album one and you listen to them chronologically from the first album to this album, it does seem like subtle changes from album to album. But I think if you listen to what we’re doing now to what we were doing twenty years ago, it’s very vastly different. So I think we are always adding a lot to each album, but I think we’re still keeping enough that it still very much sounds like a Psycroptic album. I think a lot of that is down to Joe’s style of playing guitar as well. He’s got a very unique way of riffing, so he’s very distinct in what he does. Even if we add a lot of different elements, the trademark sound’s always gonna be there.

Is there’s also an element of everyone else getting better at what they’re doing as musos and songwriters?
Exactly, and that’s definitely something that over the years we’ve got a lot better at. In the early stages of the band, we were very much a stereotypical tech‑death band that crammed too many riffs into a song, playing too fast all the time, and everything was just about how extreme and fast and technical it could be, sometimes at the cost of having a memorable song or a catchy groove. As we’ve gotten older and matured and progressed as songwriters, we’ve definitely tried to write more of a cohesive song, knowing when to go all in with the speed and technicality, but also knowing when to hold back on a groove or something catchy, or a big epic chorus. We’ve definitely honed our craft over the years.

What were your thoughts when you played the final mix of the album from start to end for the first time?
Thank fuck we’re finished. No, it was kind of a… I remember Joe sent it through and he’s like, I think this is it, I think this is the one and yeah, did the whole thing of sitting down in front of the stereo in my armchair and listened through to it. It feels like a little bit of a glorious moment when you listen through it for the first time when you know it’s the finished product. More than anything, you just feel proud of what you’ve done, and you think, this is the best album the four of us can put together at this point in our lives. I’m fucking stoked with it.

Was it hard letting it go, especially after agonising over it for three years?
It’s a nice feeling. I think the hardest part about releasing an album is when you know that first single’s about to go up. I get immense amounts of anxiety knowing our first single’s going to be going out the next day, because as much as in your mind you’re happy with what you’ve done and you know you’ve got a good product, there’s still that whole unleashing your baby onto the world. What are people going to say? What’s the reaction going to be? What’s the feedback going to be? We’ve never really had an album that hasn’t done reasonably well, never had an album where everybody’s just like, what the fuck is this shit? But still, every time, just before it goes out, you’re kind of in the back of your mind like, fuck, what are they going to think? Feedback always comes back great. The response to the first two singles has been awesome, lots of positive feedback, new label’s happy with everything. But it’s just that weird feeling when you let go of it, it’s not ours anymore, it’s everybody’s now. There’s a weird feeling you go through when that handover happens.

Is it hard to escape that feedback as well?
We’re pretty good at, YouTube’s not really a place where you go to look for feedback, because you see so many assholes that don’t even have any interest in the style of music we play, and people are very vocal on there and like to be assholes. But a lot of stuff we see on social media and reviews has been really great, so yeah, nothing to really be worried about in the end.

It must be good to top things off with another big tour around the country with Rivers of Nihil?
That’s going to be awesome. We were out in the US with those guys last year. We did a tour with Ne Obliviscaris, Rivers of Nihil and us last year, November, December in the US and Canada. Those guys are a great band, great guys, good friends. I think it’s going to be a really good pairing for the Australian tour. I think the Australian audiences is going to be really good. It’s going to be a killer tour.

Do you personally pick the local supports as well, Growth and Slaughter Cult?
I think that was Dave, our drummer. He was the one… he’s sort of the mastermind. He’s not actually our booking agent anymore in Australia, we’re with Destroy All Lines, but Dave does work as a booking agent, so he’s kind of got it figured out, how to pick line-ups and strong line-ups. He’s been the one that’s been the mastermind of putting together all the line-ups of our album launch tours for the last twenty years or so and he’s very good at it.

Beyond the tour, what’s next for you guys? Planning for a fairly lengthy stint overseas?
Yeah, so we’re off to Japan after the Australian tour, which is going to be cool. I think it’s three shows, maybe four over there. Then we’re looking at the moment, with our booking team in Europe and the US, at getting tours over there. We’re hoping either late this year or early next year we should start rolling out tours in Europe, US, Canada and then hopefully maybe some other weird and wacky places if we’re lucky and the album starts doing well enough. So over the next twelve to eighteen months, we’ll be pretty flat out on the road.

It must be humbling with how far and wide your music’s taking you now?
We’ve been lucky since pretty early in our career. We used to have a lot of opportunity touring Europe back when I first joined the band, like twenty two years ago. It’s been good. We’re at the point now where the majority of places we’d want to tour, we can kind of make it happen. There’s always going to be at least a small tour, if nothing else, that we can do. So we are in a good position now. Fuck, we’ve been around since 1999 now. We’re not the new kids on the block anymore.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Psycroptic on the following dates with Rivers Of Nihil, tickets from Destroy All Lines…