Anaal Nathrakh are the band that makes Black Metal the way I always wished it been played. For so long Black Metal has been the victim of its own genre and self-imposed parameters that the power of the art form was getting lost. Anaal Nathrakh has largely changed that ideal by stripping down what Black Metal was and rebuilding it into what it could be.
Don’t get me wrong, Anaal Nathrakh are woven deep into the fibers of old school Black Metal but they have rejuvenated the music by understanding that good production value and a full rich sound does more to move the genre forward than being mired in clichés. A point they’ve proven repeatedly over their six albums.
The seventh and latest record is titled “In The Constellation Of The Black Widow” and continues the band’s sonic assault on the music world. This record is epic, brutal and another musical growth from a band who continues to evolve from record to record. I got a few minutes to sit down with V.T.R.I.O.L. and talk about the new album, how they went from studio to live band and the future for Anaal Nathrakh
V.I.T.R.I.O.L.: We didn’t like what we were hearing in the extreme metal we were listening to at the time. There was an increasing proliferation of what we saw as weak music, keyboards, predictable directions and so on. So we decided to do something that was a fuckload nastier. We knew each other from playing in local demo bands, and when Mick wrote a few songs and asked me to sing on them, we thought the results were great. Things spiraled rapidly downwards from there.
V.I.T.R.I.O.L.: We took it from an incantation that was used in a film we both liked called Excalibur, a strangely down-to-earth British film of the Arthurian legend. But basically as soon as we’d decided to use it, we stopped thinking about what it meant – it became just the name of the band, with no wider significance. The example I usually use is, what’s a Metallica? Who cares? The point is that it doesn’t matter once you’re used to the name, it’s just a label for the band. Its sole function becomes to sound distinctive.
V.I.T.R.I.O.L.: We really don’t care. If people want to call us Black Metal, that’s up to them, and it doesn’t bother us. We don’t particularly agree with them, but I can see why they would, because our music comes at least in part from Black Metal, and the term is still relevant to what we sound like today. And ideologically and in terms of aesthetics we’re close to some of the standards of BM.
But we’re not interested in embodying any given style because genres aren’t important to us – I don’t think it makes sense for any band to start out saying ‘we’re going to be x’ and set about epitomizing only that style. Maybe some people do do that, of course, and that’s up to them. But for us it would feel like too much of a constraint. And remember, every genre around today only came about because some pioneering bands did something different to everyone else. We’ll just play what we want to play, people can call it what they like.
V.I.T.R.I.O.L.: We weren’t on a mission to revolutionize the sound of the band, but we did want to make the album embody what we are as viscerally as possible – and I like to think we managed it. That’s why reviews I’ve seen have said things like it incorporates and melds together the different aspects of our sound particularly well, and brings back the viciousness of the early stuff we did. The next one might be a bit more experimental, I don’t know yet. But this time around it was all about gathering everything together as expertly as possible and then hurling it forwards to make the most focused, gripping distillation possible of all the anguish and rage we’ve done so far.
V.I.T.R.I.O.L.: It’s based on a line from a book called Moment of Freedom by a Scandinavian author called Jens Bjørneboe – I’m not sure how the book is thought of in its domestic territory, but I thought it was incredible. A portrait of a brilliantly clever man wading through dark times, both in his mental illness and depression, as well as historically, being as it spans the period of the second world war. In the story, among other things, he’s creating a document of the inhuman treatment and suffering that people inflict on others, and at one point he says that within ten years, he’ll have accumulated so much knowledge of the cruelty and suffering in the world that life will no longer be bearable.
And ten years after the book was published, the author killed himself. Strong stuff. Towards the end he’s describing two things simultaneously – his trips to view various works of art at museums across Europe, and the principle events of the war as they were happening at the same time. It’s weirdly detached and emotionless, and all the references to the real world events are sort of coded metaphors, but it’s that very fact that makes it all the more forceful. And he eventually says that Uranus and Pluto stood in conjunction in the sign of the black widow.
He’s referring to the nuclear bombs in Japan, and when I read that part I just stopped and stared at the page for a while. The most cataclysmic event in human history, expressed as a coldly detached yet crushingly apocalyptic metaphor. Then when I thought about it more later on, I knew I’d found the perfect album title.
