Behemoth’s Nergal Slams Majority of New Metal Albums for Sounding ‘Robotic’
On top of his music, Behemoth bandleader Adam "Nergal" Darski is known to metalheads for freely speaking his mind on a wide variety of topics, including the very business of metal — just two months ago, he warned metal musicians against starting new bands.
"Do you really want to put another song on another album that no one will pay attention to?" Nergal asked at the time. Now, the Behemoth figurehead and extreme metal veteran is taken modern metal record-making to task, saying the production of most metal music today sounds "robotic."
"Every band these days, you talk to every band, and every band — literally, heavy metal band, thrash, death, whatever — says, 'Oh, we managed to get that organic sound,'" Nergal recently illustrated to Australia's Heavy magazine. (via Blabbermouth)
"And then I go and listen to those records," he continued. "I'm, like, 'There's nothing organic about this record.' Ninety-nine percent of the records, they sound robotic. Every fucking click, every kick, every snare drum, every part of the record is exactly the same."
Nergal opined, "It's not organic. Organic is when music fluctuates, when there's dynamics, when it goes up and down. … These days, you can fucking perfect things to the point that you cannot fucking listen to it. Because the perfection makes things boring, imperfect and … uninteresting. Live, it's not perfect – that's why it's so fucking exciting. So why make things that are just so fucking polished?"
The musician, who also performs in the country-blues group Me and that Man, added, "I don't get it, especially in extreme metal music. It's gotta be fucking weird, it's gotta be dangerous. Where is the danger factor? So I really wanted to bring the danger factor back to our music."
Behemoth released their latest, Opvs Contra Natvram, last fall. Listen to the effort's "Versvs Christvs" below. The Polish blackened death metal band is scheduled to tour throughout Europe this summer.