US doom/sludge metal outfit Inter Arma is well on its way to become the next Mastodon, Baroness or Kylesa. Their latest album, entitled Sky Burial, is a mandatory listen when you like your sludge metal challenging and innovative. Guitarist Trey Dalton was more than happy to share his views on the new album, its recording process, evolving as a band and many other subjects.
Sky Burial draws from many different genres, like hardcore/punk, black metal, sludge/doom and lots of psychedelics. How do you guys manage to fuse all those different elements into cohesive song material?
I think the most important thing to understand is that we’re not trying to do that. We haven’t set out a statement of intent as far as our music is concerned. Granted, we like covering lots of the musical landscape, but we don’t sit around at practice saying things like, “I think we should put a death metal part here”, or “let’s make this one sound like the Bad Brains”. We individually will bring music to the group and then we’ll hash it out collectively. Because we come from such eclectic and wide ranging musical backgrounds our songs end up going many different directions.
What are your fondest memories of the writing and recording process of Sky Burial? What were you guys aiming for?
There’s nothing quite like having spent a year or two shaping songs, finally putting them down on tape and hearing it back for the first time. It’s almost otherworldly. You have all these preconceived notions about what your music sounds like and more often than not it will hit you from a totally different and unexpected musical or emotional place. Writing the music, especially with these dudes, was a blast. However, I don’t think it quite compares to hearing the mixes that Mikey started sending to us shortly after wrapping up.
Inter Arma is often compared to Neurosis, Amorphis, The Dillinger Escape Plan and Mastodon. All reputable bands with a proud heritage. What do you think of this?
I think that’s awesome. I love all of those bands and I think they’ve collectively done an incredible amount for heavy music. “The Karelian Isthmus” is absolutely crushing, and we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation if it wasn’t for “Through Silver and Blood” or “Leviathan”. If we ended up next to those guys in the annals of heavy music history then I’d be absolutely thrilled.
The Southern states in the US produced a steady stream of high quality sludge/doom metal acts, like Mastodon, Black Tusk, Baroness and Kylesa to name a few. Do you guys feel part of that same scene as well?
In one sense, sure, but not entirely. Right now we don’t have nearly the same following that any of those bands do, and perhaps that will change over time, but from a stylistic stand point I think there’s some similarity to how we all approach music. I’ve said this before, but I think that geographic location during childhood is incredibly important to how your world is shaped. This is particularly relevant to music. Most of the guys (and lady) in the aforementioned groups, ours included, are from the South, particularly rural South. Rural southern music has a rich tradition that undoubtedly changed and shaped how we view, listen to, and play music. The chance that a band from LA or Chicago is going to introduce folk instrumentation into their songs is much less likely than someone who’s originally from Appalachia or other parts of the rural southern United States. Not impossible, mind you, but unlikely.
Especially Mastodon, Baroness and Kylesa evolved their music in order to keep things interesting for themselves. How does this work for Inter Arma?
I can’t imagine being in a band that is completely creatively stagnant. It must be incredibly boring. If you don’t want to push yourself musically, whether that means as a player or from a broader perspective of what you want to play or how you create songs, then why even play music? Don’t get me wrong, I love all the music we’ve written in the past, and I think “Sky Burial” is our best stuff yet, but I sincerely hope that when we record something new that it doesn’t sound exactly the same. That would be highly disappointing.
Inter Arma is signed to Relapse, a renowned label that produced many ground breaking releases over the years. How does it feel working with them and how are things between the label and the band so far?
So far everything has been awesome. They’ve been incredibly easy to work with and are all working really hard for us. We’ve gotten more exposure over the past month and a half than we had the entire other 6 plus years of the band’s existence. It’s a bit surreal, though. Most of us read Resound magazine and listened to Relapse bands growing up. Joe was even on a Relapse street team (when those were a thing) years back. It’s wild how things have come full circle as far as that goes.
You guys have a serious D.I.Y attitude. What are the pros and cons of doing things that way?
Well, I hesitate to say that we are strictly a DIY band. We’ve done a lot of DIY touring for the past few years, but a lot of that has been because of necessity. If you want to tour, which we did, but you don’t have a booking agent or label support to help, which we didn’t, then you have to do it yourself. I will say that having helped book a few DIY US tours and seemingly infinite regional stuff in the same manner, it gives you a much deeper appreciation for anything positive that comes to you while you’re on the road. We’ve gotten paid in change, with broken microphones and dumpstered peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or nothing at all plenty of times. I think doing things the way we’ve done them has managed to keep us pretty level headed in terms of our expectations as a band. But DIY isn’t a bad thing. We’ve met a hundreds of wonderful people who’ve put on great shows for us, fed and housed us, and enabled us to keep doing what we love to do. There is certainly a ceiling that you reach doing DIY stuff, but I wouldn’t go back and change our course of action if given the opportunity.
How do you guys deal with the rigours of touring?
People act like touring is extremely strenuous and unpleasant. Are there negatives to touring? Absolutely there are. However, I’ll accept sitting next to some smelly guys for 9 hours, loading in, playing for 40 minutes, loading out, heating up ramen at wherever we’re staying and sleeping on the floor over getting up to work in a kitchen at 5:30 AM every day. Sure, you don’t sleep as well as you do when home, and you might not get to eat 3 square meals a day, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun and a really cheap way to travel. But to answer your question, I go to sleep before everyone else, usually in the van, and wake up before everyone else as to keep some sense of normalcy while travelling.
Sticking with the touring theme, what are your touring plans for the rest of this year? Is there any chance Inter Arma will come over to Europe?
We are about to embark on a US tour with our pals in Mutilation Rites. We’re also playing some different US festivals later in the spring and early summer and will probably do some touring around those. Regarding Europe, we’d love to come over there, and have every intention to. We’re all basically waiting for the right opportunity to arise and hopefully when the record comes out it will garner a little more international interest.
Finally, which local bands can you recommend to our readers?
Windhand, super catchy traditional doom with spectacular vocals, is about to blow up so jump on the train before you’re too late. There’s a blackened hardcore band called Unsacred who I like a lot. Devil’s Hand is one of the tighter hardcore/punk bands to come out of here in a while. On the less heavy side of the spectrum, we’re good friends with the band The Young Sinclairs, who play 60s influenced psyche rock. We’re actually working on doing a split with them which should be adequately weird.
Raymond Westland