Richard HolmesPlague Rider have been spreading their disease through the UK underground since 2011 – and since the release of 2023’s Intensities, their contorted, mutated and ultra-experimental take on death metal has been drawing international acclaim.
Rushonrock’s Rich Holmes grabbed a post-rehearsal beer with vocalist James Watts, bassist Lee Anderson, guitarist Jake Bielby and drummer Matthew Henderson, and took a deep dive into the band’s philosophical inspirations, musical DNA and creative mindset.
Rushonrock: Creating an album as complex and expansive as Intensities must have been a challenge – how did you approach it?
Jake Bielby: I’d spent ages on (closing track) Without Organs. That was the perfect end, so it was like writing backwards from there, trying to get into that core movement so it would all fit together somehow. It was hard to write!
I write without the guitar and without touching any instruments, that way I’m not limited in ideas. Rather than looking at what I can do on the guitar and then thinking it’s impossible, I’d rather not look at it, and then try and figure it out. It is a very backwards way of doing it, but it works for us.
Lee Anderson: A lot of the parts were written with two guitarists in mind, who would do different things. So when we came to record it, we had been playing with one guitarist for such a long time that we were like, ‘where did this come from?’.
Rushonrock: Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
Matthew Henderson: I wouldn’t have recorded it on the hottest day in the UK! Doing drums in a tiny room was pretty fucking awful – I was pretty much in my vest and pants… That said, it is the only release that I have ever played on that I can listen back to and be quite happy with. We know how much time and effort we put into it. We spent that long getting all the finer bits down on the album, that it did reach its potential.
Rushonrock: What about the lyrics? Where do you draw inspiration from?
James Watts: The lyrics take a long time. I am quite invested in them. On the album, three of the songs are based on (French philosopher) Gilles Deleuze and (French psychoanalysis and activist) Félix Guattari’s and A Thousand Plateaus. That book is deliberately really dense and difficult to read. Lots of the chapters try to explain the same kind of theory that everything is complicated and branching, with these weird analogies and scenarios.
Challenger’s Lecture is about this guy explaining about how ideas come about and how they become stratified, and then you get rules and stuff. But it’s explained in terms of this guy in the lecture. Challenger is a sort of Sherlock Holmes villain, who’s sort of a semi-ape and it’s him giving a lecture. And then there’s bits from HP Lovecraft that are pulled into it and by the end he dissolves.
From A Thousand Plateaus I got into people like Mark Fisher and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit who were into left wing philosophy, but weird, Mark Fisher in particular is very good at picking the holes in the misery of living under late-stage capitalism.
Rushonrock: Intensities’ artwork certainly isn’t in the gore-drenched, typical death metal style…
The artwork is link to Challenger’s Lecture. It’s from that chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, a big screed about how God is a lobster and each possibility is hinged to another possibility and everything is double bound, so I’m like, ‘that’s a metal lyric!’.
I thought, ‘right I’m going to get loads of claws cast in resin, but demolded before the resin has set, so it morphs into itself’. That was kind of the point, to make it sort of amorphous, but with recognisable things in it… and keep it far away from metal art.
There’s some metal art I like, but a lot if it is rules based: I don’t think we’re ever going to have skulls on a cover. I think it’s really easy to plonk an image on something. Metal has skulls and zombies, and pop records have headshots. I feel like if you’re going to do art it should fit together with the music. It should be a whole thing.
Rushonrock: With the likes of 2018’s Rhizome EP and now the Intensities album, you’ve splintered extreme metal’s boundaries, and created something that stands apart from a lot of modern DM. Where do you think your place is?
LA: We are in the gap between metal and experimental… somewhere in between. People who like the more extreme, weird side of metal will grow towards it, people who like more avant-garde stuff will find something in it as well.
JW: We fit well on bills with bands that don’t fit well on bills – the outcasts! (Brooklyn death metal experimentalists) Pyrrhon have done well and we are more of a fit for that kind of stuff – and the New York scene – than the UK stuff. (Pyrrhon’s success) beds in that you can do death metal, but a bit weird.
We do still occasionally empty rooms though… there was a gig in Huddersfield where there was a full room when we started and there were just a couple of people left at the end!
Rushonrock: How do you relate to death metal? Do you feel like a death metal band?
JW: As much as we’ve definitely not an old school death metal band, Plague Rider feels quite authentic to the spirit of that stuff. There are loads of articles that pop up about the early death metal bands, and they would write things they couldn’t play. They would go into the studio and it would be beyond their capabilities at that point. I quite like that notion of just pushing yourself to that point physically. I think what’s interesting about a lot of that old school stuff is that it’s before people invented rules for the genre. It was just people being weird. And then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘alright, this is what you have to do’.
LA: When writing our first album (2013’s self-titled opus) there were bands we loved and we wanted to replicate them in a way. We loved Pestilence and Death and thought we could mix some of their style in, but still sound original. Nowadays we aren’t thinking about bands like that. We write what feels right.
MH: Plague Rider is, in my opinion, what death metal is in our heads. It has the extreme sound that is death metal.
Rushonrock: Lee, Matthew and Jake were all members of Live Burial, who played a part of UK death metal’s recent resurgence. What is Plague Rider’s perspective on the country’s DM scene?
LA: It’s well represented, you see a lot more articles which are solely focused on UK death metal l don’t remember seeing that for a long time until fairly recently. The UK has been left out for quite a long time but I think now there is a strong focus on the bands coming up.
MH: There are loads of UK bands who are proficient in the different styles of death metal. Cryptic Shift, Vacivus, ATVM, they all have their own sound.
RH: You’ve been taking Plague Rider out on the road, playing with bands such as ATVM, Liturgy and Diskord. How challenging is to recreate your recorded work live, given how elaborate it is?
LA: It can take a few months before we are comfortable enough to bring it to a live audience, but playing shows is still fun for us. It’s not like we are struggling to play it. We are all locked into it and we get lost in it.
JW: We have done a bunch of gigs where the sound on stage has been poor and we haven’t been able to hear each other very well. And we’re kind of at a point now where we can do the set from memory even if we can’t hear each other. However, once we start putting new material in, it gets more tricky again!
Intensities is out now on Transcending Obscurity Records.