Richard Johnson, Ivan Khilko, and Ethan Griffiths have been the stable line-up for Virginia’s rollicking Drugs of Faith for a while now. Not only does the band have one of the coolest names in rock and metal, they have also never put out anything that wasn’t essential. The pattern continues with Asymmetrical, perhaps the unit’s most crackling and timely release to date. Out Feb. 21st via Selfmadegod Records, this album finds the grind n’ roll band asserting even more dissonance, precision, riff-perfection, noise grit, and concerned realism into their fierce sound.
Morgan Y. Evans for GCM: Hi Richard! Awesome to chat again after years. I know you have been doing some cool musical detours from DoF such as the Digital Negative industrial stuff (which was dope), but what spawned the birth of this new Asymmetrical record? Just felt like time to grind again?
Richard: Hi there! Thank you for the kind words. You know, the last thing we put out before Asymmetrical was a 7”, so we decided it was time for working on full-length record.
MYE. You’ve always had a distinct scream/voice, but you also are a vocalist who I feel like often has semi-legible lyrics. Which is more common in noise rock (like Shellac or Steel Pole Bathtub) than metal. I like some gurgly cookie vocals and all that, haha…but with political songs or intense shit it also is nice to know what you are saying when there is a message. Asymmetrical is a cool album name, because the world seems more so every day. Surfing chaos.
Richard: Yeah. In the U.S. right now, politically, chaos is the right word. Sure, I like to sing the lyrics at least somewhat clearly, but we still include the lyrics in our records so people can read along if they want.
MYE: I read the song “Essential” is a cover of a defunct European band DrDoom (pre- Teethgrinder), who Drugs of Faith played shows with before. That is flattering of you to cover them. I think it is really cool when people shout out peers or past more underground bands they love, instead of only covering some mainstream shit. I mean, as much as I would love to hear you sing pop. Man, that end riff in “Essential” is so fuckin’ gnarly and ominous!
Richard: DrDoom was great. When we went to Europe, the airline lost our luggage and on the second day of the tour, we borrowed a guitar and bass from them. At the time we had the same guitar tuning as them so it worked out well. I wouldn’t be against doing a cover of something mainstream if we could figure out a cool way to do it. I don’t know what that would be.
MYE: I wanted to ask about “The Next 100 Years” in particular. Prob my fave on here. We really have destabilized a lot of the global south, who also pay a lot of the price for pollution that primarily takes place elsewhere. I just can’t believe how insane it is that we can’t as a species see things as a biosphere. Unless the greed faction really are just doing whatever they can to hoard wealth and a false sense of their own security, despite lying to the public that there’s nothing to worry about with global warming and shit.
Richard: That’s right. It sounds like you and I have some of the same views about global trends. The lyrics on the record in general are bleak, but I guess that one is the one song on the record that has a hopeful tone, but even then only partially. As you say, the problems are recognized, at least by some people, around the world. You keep seeing headlines from climate scientists about how we’re crossing another temperature and pollution threshold, and then another one and another one after that. At what point do people give up and, I don’t know, stop having kids? Will that happen?
MYE: Let’s talk “Divestment”. I used to be in a band called Divest, ha. This ties into the last question a little with the resource wars theme you sing about in “Divestment” sort of threading through both. I wish more people would do ethical boycotts. This song almost seems like building onto the present and adding even more foreboding, like bridging into some Mad Max-type shit (sans crazy Mel beliefs). I mean, we aren’t even far away from that type of post-apocalyptic world now. There was a great band I loved called Dripping Goss and on their last album for CBGB’s records, my friend Brian in the band sang about how his grandfather said that someday water would be paid for. That is so commonplace now we don’t even question it. And these fucking Tariff Wars asshole is starting would make me laugh at the scope of stupidity and economic ignorance, if it didn’t have consequences.
Richard: Sure, boycotts are one tool people can use, definitely. I’m glad you mentioned Mad Max, because I used some imagery from the third one in the lyrics. Paying for water is one thing, but paying for air will be another thing. Giant corporations are investing in owning water sources so they can use them to make chocolate bars or whatever as clean water becomes more and more scarce. This is the sort of thing Killing Joke used to talk about all the time. The thing about these tarriff war threats from the U.S. is, a few countries so far are caving to the threats.
MYE: Love the dirty, but precise and crunchy guitars and jagged bass tones, live-sounding drum sound and the ferocious sense of adrenaline in each song. Nothing is a wasted moment. How did you decide on how much material to include? How were the recording sessions? Kevin Bernsten seems to have really gelled with you guys.
Richard: Awesome, thank you. Yeah, we recorded with Kevin many times and we didn’t have to talk a lot about what we wanted because he understands us. We like to have a distorted bass tone but still be able to hear the riffs. You’re hitting on something we go for with the guitar tone, like, clean but distorted and aggressive at the same time. I think Godflesh had that balance really well on the Hymns record. And we did a cover of a song from that album. Kevin had a few spontaneous ideas for sounds on the record that made it better. The tracking was a great experience. You know, since we wanted to do a full-length record, I think it was important for it to be of a certain minimum length. 10 tracks and about 20 minutes seemed reasonable these days.
MYE: Noise rock has never gone away, but there seems to be a renewed surge in popularity via like Chat Pile or The Jesus Lizard reforming, etc. Which is cool, because it isn’t like the genre has gotten more palatable. Are you hoping to cash in and get big beach umbrellas and move to Newport, CA? That kind of seems anathema to your song topics, haha. That said, we really do need society to support the arts more and stop treating them as disposable. And by support, I don’t just mean grossly commercializing and stripping everything of meaning with corporate branding partnerships either, lol.
Richard: I think bands are selective about what sort of branding they’ll tolerate and what they won’t. It just depends on which way the cultural winds have been blowing in music. Some things are okay and others aren’t. These days in the U.S., federal budgets are being cut and I don’t think the arts are being discussed a lot right now, but I’m sure money for that will go away. Artists and non-governmental foundations that support them will have to come together more than in the past, I think. We enjoy putting more noise rock in our music. We’ve been adding it in more for the last few releases. It’s like saying, “I want to write a bunch of songs that are more death metal” or anything else, although I don’t think we have a “noise rock song,” but more like noise rock parts or noise rock riffs. Well, I should point out that we do have what I call “rock songs,” which are our songs that don’t have any fast parts in them.
MYE: Every step of this band has really seemed like an important part, but it feels right now like you really have it down to the core essence of what Drugs of Faith is about with this release. Did you know it was a special one when it was coming together?
Richard: That’s interesting. I think it turned out really well, but we worked on the songs for such a long period that we maybe didn’t appreciate what we had until we got a rough mix of it. Maybe this record is more focused overall than our last full-length record, Corroded. Maybe in that way, it’s more like our first, self-titled album. It’s hard to say because one of the reasons we called the record Asymmetrical is it’s not focused and we sort of said, “that’s what it is.”
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MORGAN Y. EVANS
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