The Infernal Sea strike their own path through the black metal mire with a unique blend of rock ‘n’ roll headbanging and black metal ferocity. We sat down with D.L (vocals) to unpick how their unique sound came about, as well as some other choice topics. “It’s definitely an intentional thing,” D.L says when asked about how the sound was developed, “we’ve always been a rock ‘n’ roll infused black metal band, we never really wanted to be a blasting chaotic black metal band, there’s bands out there that do that awesomely, it’s just not for us.” The collective worked together to forge their style, “we have a lot of influences, we’re all into death metal, black metal, hardcore, hip-hop, folk, we listen to everything. We try to bring a little bit of everything into the music, by writing songs that we like enjoy, and take them influences in.”
The new album Hellfenlic is replete with top tapping riffs, underpinned by meaty drum beats, like the double stop section on ‘Shadow of the Beast’. A symptom of their rock ‘n’ roll background, “that riff (in ‘Shadow of the Beast’) is a pure headbanging riff, when J.E wrote that, it just had us all nodding. He writes a lot of earworms, as soon as we heard that riff we were just like yes, that has to go in, that’s the basis of the song it has to go in there. That’s what we’re all about, it’s the headbanging riffs, because it’s rock ‘n’ roll and rock ‘n’ roll is fucking cool.”
This attitude of creating music for themselves first and foremost carries over into the recording process, where J.B (drums) takes on a lot of the work, “our drummer J.B, he ran a studio called the Noise Cabin, so we’ve been quite lucky with that really. Pretty much everything we’ve done so far, aside from the first album. J.B is really good at engineering; he’s recorded pretty much everything else.” This DIY attitude was put to the test during the pandemic, and has carried on beyond, rather than meeting up and jamming out songs the band prefers to start off, “separate and then we come together once the songs are formed to see how they feel in a live situation. Our guitarist J.E is really good at demoing and sorting out songs, and there’s a fair amount of contribution from C.R now too. They both contributed together a lot more on Hellfenlic, a lot of the songs on that record are actually 4 years old, we wrote them during the pandemic, it was the perfect time to just sit down and write really.”
Sometimes it’s a slog to hash the music out, these things take time, D.L knows this all too well, “you’ve got to be in the mood for it, you’ve got to be in the zone. If you’re having a period where you’re down and depressed, it can be quite crucial to write in as you’re in a different zone. Whereas if you write when you’re in a happier state the music takes on that uplifting feeling too. So, it is quite pivotal when you write stuff that if you’re not feeling it, you can’t force riffs or lyrics out because it’s just not going to work, then it can become frustrating.” At times songs can take months to come together, but like the preverbal flood gates, “one day it connects, then I can write all 8 songs there and then and be like cool I’ve got this now.”
“As soon as we heard that riff we were just like yes, that has to go in, that’s the basis of the song. It has to go in there.”
Hellfenlic takes a look inside the psyche of the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, who straddled the line of serial killer and devout servant of god. D.L wanted to approach the problematic story from a different angle, “he was very delusional. I didn’t want to approach the writing in the same way other people have and just sing about what happened during the witch trials. I didn’t want to sing about Salem, I wanted to keep it focused on England and I purposely tried to theme it around his frame of mind, his delusion and then his anger and descent into paranoia. All of these raging emotions of this absolute madman, and that’s the melting pot of the lyrics, how delusional he was and believing he was doing the right thing the whole time.”
The Infernal Sea have become known as one of the new wave of black metal bands that use a high level of theatricality on stage, donning horrifying garb to complement their terrifying lyrical content. For some, this can be confusing, many are used to a band coming on stage dressed in t-shirt and shorts, or jeans and just pounding out their 8-10 song set list then leaving. We asked about the link between black metal and theatricality, “I think it’s because it’s really extreme. The theatrics add to the extremity, if visually you look horrible, musically you sound horrible that is appealing to people. And black metal attracts strange and interesting characters, that express themselves in very unique ways.”
The garb itself looks hot and heavy, especially under the lights on stage, a fact confirmed by D.L, “I think it adds a level of conflict; the masks are uncomfortable, the robes are really warm, when we first get them on we think just fuck this, but it feeds us. We feed off that conflict, go out on stage and smash it, we’ve always kind of ironically said, we suffer for our art, of course we’re gonna wear these and suffer for it. It does mean you can sweat a few of those beers off too, especially in the summer.”
Rounding out the interview we touched on what the future holds for the next record(s), “not many people sing about medieval times. And there is a lot of history, there’s thousands of years of history here (England). There are a couple of subjects that I’m toying with already. A lot of stuff that you see about medieval times is glamorized, it has that renaissance sort of feel to it, very regal appeal to it. But it was a shit time, if you were poor, the kings were horrible, you didn’t live long, there was always fighting.”