Withered Interview: SXSW 2010

While Withered embodies black metal, guitarist/vocalist Mike Thompson says the band offers a fresh perspective conceptually. "A lot of people use music as escapism. Instead of escapism, we try to strip everything down to super realism." In 2009, Withered's albums, 'Folie Circulaire' and 'Memento Mori' graced numerous decade-end lists, including MetalReview.com and Decibel Magazine. The band is currently working on their third album, which stems from the ideas of moral and spiritual dualities and exploring oneself. Gearing up for their first trip to SXSW, Spinner spoke with Thompson about Withered's music, the upcoming album and their unique touring experiences.

Describe your sound in your own words.

A title line we've adopted and have started to leverage more is tortured black and doom metal. We take our black metal approach to what we do, but blend it with some heavier doom that's natural from the southeast. We incorporate that and all the lyrics and subject matter are emotionally tortuous.

How did Withered form?

Chris Freeman and I formed the band in '03 when the punk project we were doing slowed down because our bass player's other band, Mastodon, was taking off. They had their first big tour and it was two months long and we said, "Man, we're not going to sit around with our fingers up our ass. Let's just start a new band." We had been talking about black metal for a while, so that's what it was. It was basically out of boredom and not having a project.

What are your musical influences?

Personally, I'm a really big fan of Scandinavian metal, Swedish death metal and black metal. I'm a big fan of the older Dismember type stuff. Grave is a huge influence. As far as riff writing, I always go back to those kinds of things. Songwriting, a big influence is old Metallica specifically and Justice for All. That's probably my most influential album of all time. [Also,] recent black metal like Weakling -- it was a huge influence when I discovered them. Some of the newer American metal black metal movement. And I would say Neurosis.

How did you come up with your band name?

We wanted something that felt pretty cold and disparaging. Our original guitar player had the idea of calling us Winter for the obvious [reasons], but there had already been a black metal band called Winter some time ago. Since that didn't work, I was thinking about it and playing off of it and came up with Withered. I think it's really appropriate for what we do.

What's your biggest vice?

Biggest vice while touring would definitely be beer and a close second would be weed.

What's in your festival survival kit?

I would say it's definitely beer, sometimes a bottle of mead if we can find the stuff we like. And we also use a lot of BO to our advantage to repeal unwanted interaction. We try to dissuade anybody where we can.

What's your musical guilty pleasure?

My musical guilty pleasure would probably be some old 80s glam stuff. I grew up on that because of my older sister. Old Whitesnake. All the stuff that makes you think of really disgusting groupies and cocaine and animal prints. Just really terrible old Hollywood Los Angeles see-through coffee tables and stuff like that. A half naked groupie on the floor with a bleeding nose and a coffee table full of cocaine, that's what I always think of. Anything that makes me feel dirty when I listen to it. Super sultry glam metal and George Michael.

What's the craziest thing you've seen on tour?

The craziest thing is when we toured with Watain in fall of '08. They always performed with animal blood that they'd pour all over them. They had a hard time finding some. In other words, they would party too late and couldn't wake up early enough to go to a butcher shop to get a gallon of pig's blood. When we went to Montreal, we watched them hunt pigeons in a parking lot on our day off. It was pretty awesome watching these super grim black metal guys that wore nothing but leather. They looked like a biker gang walking around. They're running around with garbage bags trying to scoop them up. That didn't work. Then they tried the old Acme box propped up on a stick with a string tied to it and that's how they caught their first pigeon. Then they went down to Chinatown and bought a sling shot and that was a done deal. We watched them catch, decapitate and bleed out three or four pigeons so they would have blood for that evening's performance.

Your bio describes your upcoming release as, "how culture and society have greatly compromised humanity's potential to an extent of irreversible demise." What exactly do you mean by that and what can fans expect from your third album?

Fans can expect a continuation from our last album. The last album, Folie Circulaire, the title translates to cycling madness. We used that term and the loose concept for the album to illustrate all the mistakes humanity makes. Culturally, socially, everything that has been inhibiting us as a species. Basically, everything that's wrong with it and how we're continually repeating the same mistakes generation by generation to varying degrees. And, that we're not making any progress or emotional, spiritual growth. People have a lack of personal discovery. All the social conditioning that goes on, especially in America, we're pretty guilty of that. The whole convenience approach: life needs to be easier, simpler, lazier. That's what's been detrimental to our progress. That's where we began with the last record conceptually and we're going to use as basis and continue off of. The new record deals with moral and spiritual dualities. It's more about exploring yourself. Isolating yourself mentally and emotionally and being able to break down barriers you have so you can conceptually understand any possible perspective. It's more about forcing yourself to be honest so you have a healthy spiritual path and you can make more emotional discoveries about yourself.

What's your songwriting process?

Since me and the other vocalist are guitar players, we have a tendency to put the music first. Priority wise, it's something that's natural with extreme metal because a lot of the vocals are indiscernible. The lyrics aren't very obvious and become a secondary aspect of the music. You have to leverage the musical mood and then accent it with vocal patterns to break things up. In other words, we usually start with the music. It's usually guitar riffs for general part concepts and then we work them through every possible approach and decide what it's going to achieve with the mood we're going for. We actually start with a mood in mind and try to build off that and find the best way to illustrate it musically and then further emphasize it with the vocals and the lyrics.