Empire State Bastard
What’s in a name? If you choose to call your band Empire State Bastard, you’re making a statement-of-intent. Namely: riff after riff after motherfucking riff, battering ram rhythms, and feral vocals which splurge from death metal growls to anguished, black-hearted howls.
The band’s debut album, ‘Rivers of Heresy’, adventurously probes almost every dark crevice imaginable from the myriad sounds of metal and genre-adjacent extremity. Their terrifying tourist trail visits slamming hardcore in the vein of Siege; frenetic, visceral thrash in Slayer’s ballpark; the claustrophobic sludge of Melvins; the freeform vocal dexterity of Mike Patton; and the gargantuan stoner riffs of Sleep. Rooted in metal’s forefathers, but informed by more recent waves of leftfield aggression, Empire State Bastard are a band that can prosper at landmark metal festivals such as Download and Hellfest as well as more niche events including Roadburn and Arctangent.
The story dates back to Manchester’s Night and Day Cafe in February, 2002. Empire State Bastard guitarist Mike Vennart’s band Oceansize were sharing a bill with a then unknown Biffy Clyro. From the name, Mike expected to be greeted by a “psychedelic Welsh folk band like Gorky's Zygotic Mynci” but was instead blown away by “three guys screaming their heads off with a big Marshall stack.” Instantly the two bands shared a friendship and a mutual admiration. And when Biffy went stratospheric following the success of their ‘Only Revolutions’ album, Mike joined the band as their touring guitarist and has stayed with them ever since.
Mike and Biffy frontman Simon Neil would spend downtime on tour sitting at the back of the bus sharing the heaviest, most avant-garde or the most sickeningly confrontational music they could find. When thoughts turned to making their own sonic wasteland, Simon already had the band name in mind (“I always knew that if I made a really heavy record, it was gonna be called Empire State Bastard”), leaving Mike with a particularly grotesque challenge: what music could he write that would live up to the name?
It took around a decade to find both the time and ferocity to make it happen. Inflamed by caustic right-wing politics and bored by generic arena metal, Mike’s rush of inspiration resulted in a tonne of song ideas. At times the concept was more defined: the full-throttle ten songs-in-ten-minutes chaos of grindcore, or the calculated mathy chaos of Converge or Dillinger Escape Plan. Instead, it reflected a shared love of what Mike calls “a spectrum of wide-ranging versions of pure sonic annihilation. I’d written songs which didn’t directly relate to each other, but I like to think they all make friends with each other.”
In contrast to his work with Biffy, Simon’s contribution to the record would be almost exclusively vocals. Within the album’s first two songs, ‘Harvest’ and ‘Blusher’, his voice is more varied than ever with reference points including the shrieks and gasps you might hear on a Fantomas album to guttural death growls that echo Morbid Angel or Mayhem. “I thought of my voice as a selection of instruments that I could utilise at different points in the songs,” he explains. “I had an instinct that I needed to make everything as three-dimensional as possible. So the anger in my screaming needed to be juxtaposed with the more flippant and throwaway falsettos that you shouldn’t normally get in heavy heavy music.”
Lyrically, he smiles, “it’s as misanthropic and nihilistic as I’ve ever written” united by looking at situations “where you’re not seeing eye-to-eye with the person you need to see eye-to-eye with.” The spark was the frustration of post-lockdown society. While he expected a new unity, a fresh collective spirit, the reality was very much the opposite. “It feels like the person that shouts the loudest gets listened to the most, and that’s a real sad state of affairs. If you feel bulletproof and you don’t feel shame, you plough through and take as many people out of the game and as much collateral damage as possible. That’s something I struggle with. I think most level-headed people do, but most level-headed people don’t put their head above the parapet because it’s not worth it.”
While those themes dominate the record - targeting pig-headed ignorance in ‘Moi’, the erosion of shame in ‘Blusher’ or imagining a society beyond salvation in ‘Dusty’, there are also moments with the jet black humour of Takashi Miike. ‘Palm of Hands’, for example, provides a vignette of “going to a sex party and it going horrifically wrong.”
Underpinning the duo’s visceral attack is an equally frenetic drum performance. Akin to a runaway train just about staying on the tracks, the propulsive rush of manic fills and fleet-footed double-kicks pulverises and grooves in equal measure. Mike had programmed the initial drums, but the pair were stuck on a dilemma - who did they know who could play like Slayer legend Dave Lombardo? Simon’s solution? “Let’s just ask Dave fucking Lombardo!”
In a culmination of the pair’s teenage metal fantasies, he quickly accepted, and submitted his parts after a fortnight of sessions. “It felt like we were sitting in the room listening to Dave play for us,” says Simon, a wide-eyed sense of wonder still gleaming in his eyes. “To have the guy that basically invented modern metal drumming playing on our record made it a success in that moment.”
His contributions are especially fascinating on ‘Tired, Aye’, which saw Simon cut out the guitars and bass to create a vocal / drum assault in the realm of John Zorn’s Naked City. “There’s something so primal about that song,” laughs Simon at its sheer audacity. “It’s basically a duet. We’re like Kiki Dee and Elton John, except it’s Simon Neil and Dave Lombardo. It’s our version of ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’.”
The excitement they share for having Dave Lombardo involved is symptomatic of their pure intentions behind Empire State Bastard. Metal is what inspired them to first play music - Maiden, Metallica, Sabbath, Pantera - and while they’re at a time in their lives when rock bands are more likely to want to discover their inner Neil Young, instead they’ve made a record that purges every type of heaviness imaginable. Throughout this conversation, they reference all manner of essential aggressive artists, also taking in The Locust, Oranssi Pazuzu, Daughters, Godflesh, Max Cavalera, High On Fire, Will Haven, The Armed, Brutus and Deafheaven. In short, they’re fans. Just like you or I.
As Simon affirms, “Walking downtown as a teenager wearing a Sepultura ‘Chaos AD’ t-shirt, combat trousers and Doc Martens, people would stop and stare. That’s what makes us feel part of something and why I’ve always cared so much about rock and heavy music. We got into this music to be 1 person in a 100, rather than be part of the 99. It’s great to channel that fucking rage, that no-one else gets this but we do.”
That ethos stretches to Empire State Bastard. It’s not a time-killer between Biffy records. It’s the product of a compulsion to create a sound that’s been a vital inspiration for both men for 30+ years. They’re taking it seriously. Dave Lombardo is committed to playing as many shows as his schedule allows (the live band being completed by former Bitch Falcon bassist Naomi Macleod) and a second record is already in the works.
So what’s in a name? Simon coined it, but Mike really defined it: “I set about making the most fucking poisonous vile music I possibly could, just unabridged hatred in musical form.” That’s Empire State Bastard.