Australian deathcore titans Thy Art Is Murder hit the U.S. this month to continue the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of their sophomore album Hate.
Guitarist Andy Marsh recently shared in an interview with Heavy New York, that the band is on the verge of releasing new material in the near future. Now, in our own one-on-one with Marsh, the former rugby prospect turned band manager and label exec. dishes on what we can expect from the followup to Thy Art Is Murder's 2019 album Human Target.
"Yep, it's already done. Well, it's not complete, but all the music's done," Marsh shared of the long-awaited new album in an interview with Metal Injection. "We've got to write some more lyrics, record CJ, but I'd say the music's 100% done and vocals, maybe 30%. We recorded a lot of songs. Normally we might write a lot and cut them down, which we did this time, but we spent a couple of extra weeks, so we ended up fully recording maybe 14 or 15 songs. Normally we just do the ten plus one or two bonus ones.
"So a lot more lyrics to write and a lot more challenging to kind of discern what songs will be the final ten on the record, which has also kind of led to this switching costs like, oh, which song to work on next to prioritize? Normally you don't have that issue because we just got to bang them all out. So it slowed us down a little bit, but we should get it all finished in the days before the tour and a couple of days following the tour that we've got coming up."
Revealing that, as expected, the band reunited with longtime producer Will Putney of Fit For An Autopsy for the TBA release, Marsh shared that, while constructed in the pandemic era, the album's themes will have little to no basis in the global crisis, instead steering toward more dark and introspective territory.
"I think the biggest one is time," Marsh shared of words that come to mind when thinking on new material. "You know, normally we're making a record every two years, 18 months, 30 months, somewhere around there. And obviously with COVID we're in no rush. Human Target came out, I'm going to say, about nine months before the world shut down, so we were still very much looking forward to getting to task on that record touring it.
"We spent obviously a lot of time and money making the record, so we want to represent that as best we could, but things are out of our control. So we waited through this whole COVID thing and we did a couple of tours here supporting the record in Australia and in the States last year we did that Back to the Gulag tour. We just didn't feel any pressure from anyone to hurry up and make a record.
"With respect to the concepts and the lyrics from COVID, we didn't make a joke after the first month of COVID like how many bands are going to write songs about the virus and the government controlling us? And I was like this is just kind of low hanging fruit for us. We'd already been talking about ideas to do with political overstep, maybe, for many years. So it got a little bit darker and more introspective.
"I think you had more time to think about what's important to you and this idea of time passing and not going anywhere when we're used to passing time and moving, you know, physically around the world. We were quite stagnant geographically. So time, connection, what's important to a person were more, I don't know, visceral things to us than this whole uprising of people complaining about a virus."
Reflecting on the 10th anniversary of the bands' seminal album Hate, a record Thy Art Is Murder toasted on a sold out tour of their home country and will continue to trek across the globe in 2023, and Marsh shared that – while worlds different from the material they'd produce today – the exercise in looking back proved to be cathartic.
"Digging into the material was fun. We sat right here. He [guitarist Sean Delander] came over a couple days a week in the weeks leading up to this most recent Australian tour, and we were opening up the original sessions of Hate where we recorded it and just kind of trying to identify and pick through guitar parts, what we were going to play, how we were going to play it. And it's sort of like this weird philosophical, interesting life moment where you're observing yourself as a different person as a guitar player or as a musician.
"We were just trying to figure out some parts of songs either that we hadn't played in a long time or we hadn't played at all. 'We would never play that, these notes are all wrong and this is weird.' And you're like, 'well, we made it, but we were a different we 11 years ago to the ones that we are today.' I found it pretty fascinating, almost like finding someone’s record you know really well and saying, oh, we've got to perform this for them. That's kind of what it felt like.
"It feels like the ride of a lifetime, I'll say that," Marsh adds reflectively of the past decade for the band. "Every year passes by faster than the last. Every day goes by in the blink of an eye. Putting the whole thing together, it is weird. I mean, I'm sure the rest of the guys are similar to me. They have vivid memories, I'm sure some similar and some different to mine from 10, 12, 15 years ago of going and doing this, going and doing that.
"And to think how much time has passed and how many miles we've traveled on the journey that that album kind of set us on. I've got a drum tech, this cool guy named Perry, and he's got a spreadsheet in Google Drive that tracks all of his fights, and it has a percentage counter of how close he is to the moon. And he's like gone well past the moon by now with how many flights he's done. I'm like, we've gone past the moon at least five times of how much we've traveled performing music now. It's interesting to think about the physical distance that you will go across."
Thy Art Is Murder kickoff their Decade of Hate U.S. Tour with guests Kublai Khan TX, Undeath, I Am, and Justice For The Damned on February 8th!
2/8 Buffalo, NY – Town Ballroom
2/9 Columbus, OH – The King Of Clubs
2/10 Indianapolis, IN – Old National Centre
2/11 Joliet, IL – The Forge
2/14 St. Louis, MO – Red Flag
2/15 Des Moines, IA – Wooly’s
2/16 Lincoln, NE – The Bourbon Theatre
2/17 Lawrence, KS – The Granada
2/18 Colorado Springs, CO – Black Sheep
2/19 Albuquerque, NM – The El Rey Theater
2/21 Las Vegas, NV – House Of Blues
2/22 Santa Ana, CA – Observatory
2/23 San Diego, CA – The Observatory
2/24 Santa Cruz, CA – Catalyst
2/25 Ventura, CA – Ventura Theatre
2/26 Tucson, AZ – Encore
2/28 San Antonio, TX – The Vibes Event Center Showroom
3/1 Houston, TX – Warehouse Live
3/3 Pensacola, FL – Vinyl Music Hall
3/4 Birmingham, AL – Zydeco
3/5 Nashville, TN – The Basement East
3/6 Louisville, KY – Mercury Ballroom
3/8 Richmond, VA – Canal Club
3/9 Reading, PA – Reverb
3/10 Hartford, CT – Webster Theatre
3/11 Patchogue, NY – Stereo Garden
