While some bands are merely content in wedging their foot in the door between the underworld of challenging music and widespread acceptance, Conjurer are dead set on joining that esteemed league of artists who are booting the door clean off its hinges.
As they prepare for the release of their debut album ‘Mire’, the Midlands four-piece are well aware of the height to which the bar has been raised by their peers over the last few years.
“People are finally ready to embrace new and exciting music,” reckons co-vocalist and guitarist Brady Deeprose as the conversation eventually gets round to the recent Grammy nod by Pittsburgh hardcore game-changers Code Orange. “[Code Orange’s 2017 album] ‘Forever’ is something so different to the status quo, and people are finally willing to stand up and accept that.”
He adds: “I think it is just a culmination of the recycled nature of music over however long it’s been. I’m 23, so I was never alive in that heyday of ‘good metal’ in the early 90s, but our generation have started to find their voice and identity within music.
“It seems that bands aren’t so worried about being part of a particular scene anymore,” says guitarist Dan Nightingale, who shares vocal duties with Brady. “Around the time that I was getting into extreme metal, I was very conscious of what the popular thing was at the time. I’m not saying that I purposefully went towards that, but there was a feeling that you couldn’t help drifting towards that.”
As the pair grew up, metalcore was in a state of flux – bands like Bring Me The Horizon and The Devil Wears Prada were surging their way out of the commercial peripherals, but the movement was drifting further and further away from its hardcore genesis.
“When [Bring Me The Horizon’s] first two albums were out I was going around like, ‘Oh they’re rubbish’, but secretly I was listening to them in my room and absolutely loving it,” Dan admits. “I don’t whether it was [because] we just went further underground, but it just felt like there was no-one really flying any flags anymore.
“When we were starting bands, there were sort of guidelines for how to be in a band, but the absence of these great superstars leading the way has led to bands being more honest with themselves.”
The origins of Conjurer can be traced back to 2014, after Dan and Brady had “played around each other and with each other, but we weren’t in bands together” on the Midlands metalcore circuit for a few years.
“We both split away from our metalcore bands – we were enjoying it, but it just wasn’t what we wanted to do,” explains Dan. “We were kind of hovering around, and one day on Facebook Brady said he was getting into extreme metal and that he’d love to do a band that’s inspired by The Black Dahlia Murder and Gojira, so I was sold.’
Dan, who was already working on some darker, heavier material compared to his metalcore past, was quick to send Brady a couple of demos, one of which was for the song ‘Behold the Swine’, which ended up on Conjurer’s blistering debut EP ‘I’ – or ‘Vertical Line’, as the band have come to jokingly refer to it as.
“I’d go around to his on weekends, and there wasn’t so much talk of doing this or doing that,” Dan continues. “It was just getting to know each other and CD swapping.
“It wasn’t until we saw Yob and Pallbearer at The Underworld in Camden that we started jamming. It wasn’t like we weren’t taking it seriously at that point, but when we saw Yob, it was like the nail in the coffin and [we knew] we were going to be doing this, and that the band is a thing now.”
It took a little while for the band to solidify their identity, and although they can look back and laugh on it now, finding a decent moniker was something of a calamity for Conjurer.
“We have played with bands who come up to us and say they thought we’d be like a 1970s prog band,” chuckles Brady. “I never associated [the name] with black magic or wizards, so in my head, it was dark and evil, but then people would make massive jokes, and I got really disheartened.”
“In all the interviews I’ve watched and listened to, everyone says the best band names are three syllables long so it’s something you can chant,” Dan proceeds to shout ‘GO-JI-RA’ and ‘MAS-TO-DON’ down the phone, before joking: “I just wanted a name that meant when you log in to Spotify, we’d be right next to Converge.”
Brady adds: “Dan came to me with the name Black Nest, and I thought it was bloody cool, but then we found out that it’s a civil parish in Hampshire!”
It is often said that the greatest art is created out of conflict, and although they made a monstrous opening gambit and pricked the ears of Britain’s underground masses with ‘I’ last year, the band look back on the four-track EP with a degree of scepticism.
“I think I can comfortably say that we were happy with the songwriting but not the sound,” Brady says. “Especially from my side of things, my performances were not as good as I wanted. On the EP, it felt like we were trying to fight for how it was going to sound and it ended up not sounding quite like anyone wanted.”
Dan responds: “When you’re in a new band, no-one’s ever going to be the finished product on the first EP, no-one’s going to have it made from step one. You just put your trust in whoever you’re with.”
Brady agrees: “Now we’ve all got to know each other a bit better, we’re more embracing of the fact that, for example, Jan [Krause, drummer] wants something completely different from what Dan wants, and I want something different from what Conor [Marshall, bassist] wants, but we’ve worked together to get the sound we wanted.
“We were actually a bit blown away at how well the EP was received because we were really harsh on it ourselves, so we approached the album from a place of [thinking that] we needed to get it right this time. I wouldn’t say the album is spot-on what we know we’re capable of, but it’s definitely a massive, gargantuan leap in the right direction.”
If you thought that was ‘I’ was a monstrous proposition, it pales in comparison to ‘Mire’. From the doomy opening chimes of ‘Choke’, Dan and Brady are savage in their vocal interplay atop blast after nihilistic blast of unforgiving noise.
As punishingly heavy as it often is, what makes Conjurer’s full-length debut one of the most captivating British metal records of recent years is its fearlessness to be beautiful at times. There’s a sharper sense of melodic playing in the more expansive moments which push ‘Mire’’s envelope into ambient post-metal territory, but it’s still executed with all the voracity of the crushing blastbeats and tar-thick guitar grooves.
“The breadth of influence that we take has always been far more than we can handle,” says Brady, hinting at records as bizarrely leftfield as System of a Down’s ‘Mesmerize / Hypnotize’ as an inspiration. “But we definitely did a better job on the album of bringing that in and making it work.”
“There was a lot more belief and confidence in the material on the album,” explains Dan, who even lets out some cleaner vocals on the track ‘Thankless’ to breathtaking effect. “There are songs on the album that we were playing at our very first gig, which is coming up to three years ago.”
The album’s titanic title track – and its bleak accompanying video – was birthed from the 14th-century poem Lyke-Wake Dirge, which depicts the soul’s travel and trials on its way from earth to purgatory, but the rest of the album deals with themes much closer to Dan’s heart.
“We went in [to recording the album] with no concept or running theme or story,” he assures. “‘Choke’ is based on the intrusion that a lot of people who are in the public eye experience. I watched the Amy Winehouse documentary [2015’s ‘Amy’], and it kind of frightens me how fame can completely take over someone like that, and how most of the time she had no choice in what she was doing.
“There are a few songs that are based around mental health,” he continues. “‘Thankless’ is especially about how everything in your life may seem perfectly rosy and nothing bad has actually happened, but you still feel completely dreadful, and then you feel so guilty because there are people out there who have quote, unquote ‘legitimate’ problems.”
Even for a band that is still so young, Conjurer have made outstanding progressions on ‘Mire’ – something they in part put down to being part of the roster at Holy Roar Records, a label which is gaining the same amount of prestige as the likes of Relapse Records or Deathwish Inc. for its work in championing some of the world’s most extreme and esoteric artists.
Brady recalls: “We were in a hotel on one of the nights when we were recording the EP, and Dan put on [Holy Roar labelmates] Employed To Serve, and I was like, ‘What the fuck is this? This is awesome!’. Then Jan was going on about [British hardcore band] Svalbard, and we were wondering where all these bands were coming from. They all had Holy Roar on their music videos. I remember being like, ‘Maybe in five albums time they’ll take notice of us, and maybe we can put out an album on their label one day’.
“Their whole ‘no bullshit’ attitude comes through in the bands that they work with, and getting to play with bands like OHHMS and Wren and be part of that group has been one of the biggest influences on us as a band.”
So confident are Conjurer in their album that, for their short run of release shows towards the end of February, the band will be performing ‘Mire’ in its seven-track entirety.
“We have practised every week for the last three years,” Brady says on the eve of the tour. “It’s great to come into a band where we can have a laugh but still make notable progress week on week.”
“We’ve started writing the next album already,” Dan laughs. “So it’s weird to finally be at that point where all our songs are done, and we need to start afresh.
“The songs are so ingrained in our muscle memory now. I think the release shows are going to feel like coming full-circle, and it feels like the album is a culmination of the last three years that we’ve been doing this.”
Conjurer’s album ‘Mire’ is out now. Taken from the March issue of Upset – order your copy below.
