Evolution within a band can be one of the most important elements in their trajectory to greatness. Having released their brand new album Monarchy this August, Rivers of Nihil have been turning more than a few heads. Not only receiving critical acclaim but also the recommendation from Metal head’s the world over the band have begun to realise their full potential. Able to speak to guitar mastermind Brody Uttley, we sat down with the guitarist to speak about the brand new album, what the guitarist’s opinion of the current state of the Death Metal scene is in and what it’s like to incorporate the idea of seasons into a theoretical concept.
Listen to the full unedited interview below. Apologies for the buzzing in the later part of the interview, we did everything that we could to salvage the sound.
How was the writing process behind the album?
The writing process, I ended up writing most of the songs. The only song I didn’t write on the album was track three “Reign Of Dreams”. Which was written by our other guitarist John, he came into the band kind of at a later point in the writing process, hopefully on the next album he will be doing some more writing. As far as writing goes, we started writing it right as we got out of the studio from our first album. We had been doing some pretty heavy touring over the last two years. During the process of doing these tours come home, write a couple of songs. I wrote most of the songs right here in my house. I write on a recording program called Cubase. Basically what I would do is write a song program drums for it then send it to everyone in the band. They would make their little amendments to it as they saw fit. Alan would write his own drum parts, Jake, our singer and Biggs our bass player they would both write lyrics for the songs. So I would write a song send it to everybody then everybody would kind of give their input on it. We would go from there.
Was that similar to the kind of process that you took with The Conscious Seed Of Light?
No, it’s way different on The Conscious Seed Of Light, that was back when we were all living in the same area. So we could get together a couple of times a week and practice and kind of write songs like that but for this record we had two new members, our new drummer Alan and our new guitarist John and both of those guys are from New York City. Which is about three hours away from where me Adam and Jake live so we kind of had to do most of the writing on the computer and send it to each other or we would get it all together in a room and did songs that way, so it was definitely a lot different this time.
Do you think that may have affected the way that you actually wrote the songs yourself?
Yeah! I mean when you’re in a room with people I think there’s positives and negatives to both ways but I think when you’re in a room with people and you’re writing all together sometimes it can get a little cluttered. Everybody wants their opinion to be heard and everybody wants their part in the song and you know, you can argue about how this is going to go and how that’s going to go, whereas I’m at my house, I write a song, I send it to the guys and go hey here it is, if you have anything you want to change let me know. I guess it feels little bit cleaner, it’s a bit more efficient being able to write at home and send it to everybody. At the same time though I feel like some If the human touch has been lost just because we’re not getting together and jamming all together to write these songs. It’s more like a machine, we’re popping these songs out and kind of editing them as we see fit. I mean it definitely changed the way the songs were written but I think it was for the better.
Rivers of Nihil’s album Monarchy is out via Metal Blade Records and the band is currently on tour in the states with Hate Eternal.
