Polish Grindcore Veterans Antigama Spill the Secrets to Their Longevity

You know the axiom that metalheads who play the most absurdly extreme shit always end up being the chillest? That may not or may not always be the case, but it certainly is with Polish grindcore band Antigama. This quartet tears it up with precision, like a cross between Pig Destroyer and a 70s Italian prog band. But while they place a high value on otherworldly experimentation, they care just as much about the age-old values of fun and friendship.

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Antigama has been plugging away for 15 years, which is a long time for any band, and especially long for an underground grind outfit. But through the years they’ve managed to endure the usual lineup woes and interpersonal conflicts while keeping the blast beats fresh. “The inspiration always comes from life and past experiences,” guitarist Sebastian Rokicki says via email from his home in the Polish capital of Warsaw. “Antigama has always been something more than music for us, a big part of our lives. We still have this crazy spark burning inside us even though we're slowly getting old ha ha ha.”

It's easy for a grindcore band to paint itself into a corner, but there’s a wide palette to work with even in a genre typically known for extreme speed and brevity. Last year grind masters Gridlink delivered a masterful farewell album, Longhena, that features almost jazzy guitar chords and violin. A similar kind of esoteric brutality shows through on Antigama’s new album, The Insolent. They bring up classic grind elements with an eye towards dizziness, zig-zagging riffs, sudden turnarounds and raw, trebly overdrive, helping give the impression that they’re a fucked up death machine made out of an alloy you can only find in outer space. But in “Foul Play” they also toss in an eight-second jazz break, and in “Out Beyond” they venture out even further, wandering into a trippy jam of rumbling toms and arpeggiated synths, the latter courtesy of 66-year-old Polish electronic legend Władysław Komendarek.

You get a sense of the scope of Antigama's musicality speaking with drummer Paweł Jaroszewicz. His blast beats are highly accurate and rich with unholy low end, and he refuses to cheat with tawdry drum triggers. When he’s not playing in Antigama he does studio session work and has played in old school death metal bands as well, like Vader and (currently) Hate. But although he’s seasoned in the field, he doesn’t submit to metal orthodoxy. In his off hours he serves as a drum instructor, and he says he’s often educating younger, more narrow-minded headbangers in the ways of the world. “What I always say is, like, ‘Dude, you might want to get your head out of your ass,’” Jaroszewicz tells me via phone from Maryland Deathfest, where the band played a set last month as part of an East Coast tour. “Open your ears. Open your eyes. Look around. Just enjoy everything. There’s something valuable in every genre of music and art.”

Antigama got its start in 2000 when Rokicki teamed up with the band’s original drummer, Krzysztof Bentkowski. They’d been friends for years, trading tapes in the 90s before deciding to launch a new project when Bentkowski’s other band Sparagmos went on hiatus. For screams Bentkowski recruited Sparagmos’ vocalist, Łukasz Myszkowski, and they brought in another pal, Macio Moretti, to play bass. “I think the reason we'd started playing together was the special kind of chemistry and friendship between us at that time,” Rokicki says. “We'd spent most of the early days in our rehearsal room smoking pot and making lots of music.”

Unfortunately things haven’t always been smooth sailing for Antigama. Moretti dipped out in 2002, and the band ended up cycling through five more bassists before finally coming upon current four-stringer Sebastian Kucharski. There were other personal conflicts and personnel switch-ups, too—including a particularly drastic one when Bentkowski, after a 10-year run, got kicked out in 2010 over what Rokicki describes as a breach in “understanding” over their friendship and band cooperation.

Still, the band pressed on, balancing a love for the Napalm Death and Terrorizer canon with an interest in more exploratory sounds. Rokicki, for his part, has long loved Italian movie soundtracks and library records from the likes of Goblin and Ennio Morricone, and Antigama got a chance to do something similar in 2010 when they worked with a local director to perform as a live soundtrack band for a series of theatrical productions staged in Warsaw. The piece was about the bloody Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when Poland’s resistance fighters fought for 63 days in an effort to expel the Nazis from the capital. The historic WWII conflict was a major defeat for Poland—as many as 200,000 civilians died, and afterwards the Nazis held mass executions and laid waste to entire city blocks—and onstage Antigama helped bring the chaos to life with their riffs and screams.

Rokicki says vets would approach the band after the show to shake hands and talk about the war, some disgusted, others in tears. “It was frightening and unbelievable at the same time,” he recalls. “We love to do these kinds of things when we have a chance. We do not limit ourselves just to screams and blast beats.” Grindcore has always had political roots, and this is a powerful example of the art form forging a connection with the violence and oppression of the real world. For Antigama, doing this—and playing in general—isn’t just about wicked guitar parts or superb blast technique or awesome, gnarly lyrics. They’re digging into something deeper: those dark memories and insistent emotions and purgative urges that draw you to a sound as absurdly extreme as grind in the first place.

Still, as much as they try to push forward, Antigama don’t take themselves too seriously. “We try to have the best time possible,” Jaroszewicz says. “That’s the most important part: to play the music we love and have fun playing shows and help others have some fun as well. That’s the most important part in the whole thing for us.”