Photo by Jonah Livingston

Over the course of more than a decade, Virginia’s Inter Arma have risen to become one of contemporary extreme music’s most earth-shattering, forward-thinking, and uniquely punishing bands.

Ostensibly a sludge or post-metal band, they are really one of the elite to understand that does not mean dogmatically following a particular template, refracting everything from country music to dissonant black metal through their own prism to create records that go off like atom bombs. 

This one took a little longer. Their previous album Sulphur English in 2019 sounded bleak and tormented enough in a way that now seems ahead of its time, but the ensuing COVID pandemic and many of their own personal hurdles led to the band describing the period between it and their new album as their cursed years.

The single release of the title track New Heaven promised maybe their most dizzying release, a cocktail of freakishly technical death metal, but as you’ve come to expect from Inter Arma the album does not just follow up on the obvious. Primary songwriter and frankly extraordinarily talented drummer T.J. Childers explains the creation of their weirdest and wildest thus far.

You've alluded to in the announcement for this album that the years spent making this one were kinda cursed. It seems like the Inter Arma COVID years were particularly tumultous, what do you mean exactly by those cursed years?

Childers - Well, we went through three or four different bass players. We didn’t practice from March until August of 2020 and then the first practice back the bass player at that point quit the band, then we get another guy who didn’t work, then we were bass player-less for about six months and had a couple guys come in to be placeholders, but even that when there was so much uncertainty going on it was hard to be motivated to be productive musically. I got into a car wreck last year, wrecking Joel the new bass player’s car, banged myself up pretty good. Every band faces hardships and adversity but over the years it’s always felt like an uphill battle with us!

Joel Moore has never played bass in a band before, and now to be playing in one as multifaceted as you guys are with parts on this record where the bass is really at the fore, he must be some player to fit that demand.

Childers - That was the funny part about him joining the band. I out of everybody in the band knew him the best and knew he was a killer engineer and a killer ripping guitar player who writes great music. He has a solo record that’s like this weird Deathspell Omega avant-garde black metal record that no one’s ever heard and it’s fucking awesome. I always assumed that all guitar players have colossal egos and no guitar player would want to moonlight as a bass player in a band, so I never even considered it, and then our guitar player Steven asked him and he said yes. Going back to what I just said about not feeling productive musically when the line-up was incomplete, having Joel who I knew I could throw anything at musically was huge.

Sulphur English is such a bleakly heavy, unforgiving album that sounds like the world burning down around you and coming a year before the pandemic, now in hindsight it almost seems more fit for the kind of time you're describing during the making of this one. How did you get from that to then the vibe on New Heaven?

Childers - Sulphur English was written kind of as a reaction to what was going on in the metal scene at that time. It was a reaction to us being compared to bands musically that made me want to say, “Alright, I’ll fucking show you”, but also being so disenchanted with things that were happening in America and in politics. That record was definitely a flamethrower of a record, it was very oppressive, and so when that happened we got together and thought we could make Sulphur English 2.0 and make it a ninety-minute long noisy Merzbow record with blast beats, which I’m sure there would be people who would dig that, I would dig that, but you might also risk alienating some people and we made a collective effort to focus on the other little things that we know that we’re good at whether that be black metal, death metal, the psychedelic, acoustic sides of things, whatever it may be. We wanted to add in some new things to that and make the songs as concise as possible, and regardless of what we do I always say it’s kind of bleak but also in a strange way kind of uplifting. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel in a lot of our songs and it’s not endlessly hopeless.

The title track has been released as the lead single and is the opening track on the album. You’ve said that came to you when trying to write a “comically discordant riff” - how did that exercise then turn into the first foot into the record?

Childers - For all intents and purposes, New Heaven the song is a death metal song, right? If you were going to categorise it as one genre, let’s say it’s death metal. If you listen closely though there’s a lot of weird shit going on that you don’t hear in a lot of death metal, whether it’s odd polyrhythms or all the dissonance, and so everything we’ve ever tried to do we always try to take that far left and outside of the box turning it into our own sort of thing. Even with a song like Gardens in the Dark which is more of an industrial vibe, it’s almost kind of Nine Inch Nails-y, it’s still us doing our thing to it and taking it the way that we can into the direction that we can take it.

On Paradise Gallows you were upping a lot of that colourful psychedelic quality, and with that enamouring people so much it really went against expectations for a lot of people for the next album then went down that much heavier and bleaker route, and this album now again moves away from that. Now you're several records deep now into Inter Arma, is it becoming more or less clear what kind of direction each record is going to take?

Childers - I feel like every record we kind of hone in more on our particular take on things. The way that we’re going to write a psychedelic song, or how we’re going to write an acoustic song, it always has our particular spin on it, so to me it has become more clear over the years where if you listen to our first record Sundown which is almost fifteen years old at this point it definitely feels a bit more all over the place.

Not to oversimplify the record but with that cosmic death metal edge and the album cover with the astrological explorer, is this your sci-fi album?

Childers - It kinda turned out that way. It wasn’t really our intention to be completely honest with you, but as the songs starting developing and we were adding in different ideas, yeah. The whole psychedelic sci-fi is always kind of present in our music I think, just because we don’t even use what I normally call chords, they’re more dissonant clusters of notes. That’s come more to the surface on this as far as the weirdo sci-fi thing goes.

How much discovery in utilising new production tools and equipment was there? You could envision the studio looking like a bombsite of prog rock synthesizers.

Childers - Joel brought in the tape loop thing which we’d never done before, because he’s into the whole circuit-bending thing which I fucking love but have never tried to do any of that personally. I’m a drummer but I always say I’m a drummer with a guitar problem, and I’m always playing with different pedals and distortions and delays and reverbs, mucking around with the Ebow, and recently I’ve been getting more into keyboards now and messing around with different synths and ways to layer things in there having some other different chord or weird cluster of notes on top of whatever we’re playing to make it sound even more out of this world.

One thing that people might associate with that realm though is that hyper clean touch of technical death metal, and your drum parts in particular really don't feel like they're constructed with that in mind where you're playing that sort of progressive death metal with this thunderous, tom-heavy approach. What tends to be your process when building a piece up from the ground?

The Children the Bombs Overlooked started with the drum patterns, and then the guitar parts were filled in on top. New Heaven came from sitting in my basement trying to find the most fucked up note intervals on the guitar and evolving out of that. Most of the time it starts with the guitar part. You can write a song on drums if you’re Phil Collins or Terry Bozzio or someone but it’s rare. My big thing has always been from day one, stay out of the way of the fucking riff. I love blast beats and I utilise them plenty, but if the riff is cool, people aren’t there to hear Phil Rudd, they’re there for Malcolm and Angus. A song like The Children the Bombs Overlooked though, I don’t hit any cymbals until the last section of the song kicks in, and I like to work in those kind of parameters where you’re using the drums in a more orchestral kind of way. Dale Crover does that in some Melvins songs where it’s a steady build on the toms and maybe he’ll crash in at the end, and if you can come up with some little pattern that just builds whether it’s going from a crash every four bars to two bars to every bar you can make almost little drum riffs to add little hills and valleys.

There’s also the heavy Americana folk element that exists in Inter Arma's music, and there's a long heritage of underground metal bands now pulling from that who have made that a huge primary factor in their identity, but you on an album like this are putting that through this warping cosmic filter. How important is that idea of geographical influence to you versus other more far flung concepts?

Childers - It’s not something that we really make any conscious decision to put in, as far as making it sound like we live out in the middle of the woods. Those sorts of things organically show up, even when I’m writing a song as fucked up as New Heaven there’s always the little southern redneck things in there that I can’t get away from as a part of my being and existence at this point in my life. It’s my love of country music and the blues and old rock ‘n’ roll. As far as a folky singer-songwriter element we all love Neil Young and if you know anything about us you can figure that out pretty quickly. I love The Band, I love John Prine, I love Willie Nelson, and Mike is the same way, so that folky earthy thing makes its way in there inevitably at this point.

Your albums have a clear attention to their pacing and the running order, where Sulphur English again for example feels like it really flips on an axis before and after the track Stillness as the centrepoint. What was the kind of arc for the record you were wanting to convey this time going from that beginning hellstorm, through these different sights and sounds, but then ending on a much more feet back on the ground folk song?

Childers - Album sequencing is always super important to us and I can’t imagine anybody in a band writing a record and throwing it out there willy-nilly. I swear over that shit a lot. That said, we always try to make it so that it is hills and valleys. Sometimes it starts low and ends high, sometimes it starts high and ends low kind of how New Heaven is. We also this time around because the record is shorter and it’s a single LP had to take into consideration the fact that it’s approximately 20 minutes of music per side. When Side A ends, what do we think would be the best thing to start out Side B? The other thing I’m slightly embarrassed to admit is the fact that streaming is the primary way that people listen to music these days, and with attention spans being so short you have to frontload the record with the heavier stuff a bit. The compromise of all of those things on this record was very well met and I’m pretty pleased with it.

The album is only 42 minutes, perfectly normal album length but about 25 minutes shorter than the average Inter Arma record. What led you this time to condensing it and conveying the ideas in a smaller package?

Childers - We’re just trying to sell out. New Heaven is about seven minutes so the song lengths are by no means three and a half minute long pop songs, so we are still a million miles away from that, but we did really want to trim as much fat as possible. It was a challenge to ourselves to see if we could still say as much in five minutes as we have in twelve.

You’re a band who sit on the more progressive genre-blurring end of the metal spectrum, and you can be a much more extreme and necro band than what might typically surround you there, but at the same time you’re nowhere near being a very orthodox corpse-painted black metal. At this stage in your career, is that a spot you’ve become accustomed to?

Childers - Yeah, and again when we bring in riffs like that we roll with it whether it sounds like the Melvins or like Morbid Angel. If it’s cool and we’re vibing on it, I personally think it’s much more interesting to see a band where the songs are varied. AC/DC is in my top three favourite bands of all time, but if you listen to an AC/DC record you know exactly what you’re getting. I fucking love Cannibal Corpse, but you buy a Cannibal Corpse record and you know exactly what you getting. The records that I’ve listened to a billion times over are ones where there is more variation in the songs, whether it’s Led Zeppelin IV, or Neil Young’s Harvest, or even some of those Morbid Angel records where there are the weird synth songs and things like that. After thirty minutes you need light and shade to not turn into static.

With the directional approaches each Inter Arma album has taken, do you view these albums are sort of sequential steps each getting closer to a particular envisioned goal, or more different facets of what as an overall catalogue will become the greater representative whole?

Childers - Both I think, as I feel there are still areas musically that we haven’t covered yet that we’ve either tried and it didn’t quite pan out or just haven’t gotten to yet, but also I would say between Sulphur English and New Heaven it was the first time we’d really had a conversation about what direction we wanted the record to go. I feel like New Heaven is definitely going in the right direction but we haven’t quite made it to where I think we can make it yet. I’ve already written a couple songs for the next record, now that I know that we can pull off certain things.

The album was announced to be performed in full at Roadburn before the actual album itself had been announced. How much work went into ensuring something like this is replicable, and ready for presentation like that?

Childers - We had been rehearsing the record in full and it went well. One of the biggest things is because Mike is singing so much more now, getting him to the stage where he can get up on stage and just nail it. He’s doing it but you have two 100W tube amps blaring across the room and it can be hard to hear yourself, so we’ve been trying to make it so he can hear the pitch and where he needs to be. For Forest Service Road Blues I’m pulling a flown blown Tommy Lee and I’m gonna have a keyboard set up to my left of the kit. The nuances of that have been comical at first but once we got used to it it started sounding really good.

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New Heaven from Inter Arma is now available via Relapse Records. The album is available to order - HERE